On Thu, 18 Sep 2014 20:23:03 -0700, Robert Baer
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 17 Sep 2014 06:25:08 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

In sci.electronics.repair John wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 03:02:11 -0400, wrote:

On 9/16/2014 1:58 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair Don wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

This:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...breadboard.jpg

It's a Dolby SR prototype of some sort.

Yeah, like I said, I always do PCB from the start. This one just has a
few more white wires than usual. Good thing he had all those
conveniently located vias. lol

Yeah, a real PCB could have been done faster than making that by hand.
And you could order 5 of them. If this was Dolby, the cost of a
quick-turn multilayer board would be trivial.

I'd cut them slack (and give some credit too) considering how old that
thing is. It's actually pretty cool. I had some 70s/early 80s
"Sega/Gremlin" arcade machine boards that all appeared to have been layed
out by hand with vinyl decals. Every single trace. boards and boards of
74xx series logic circling a z80 or something like that, all done by hand.
These were production boards, but somebody spend lots of time designing
those boards. Not sure what sort of board layout tools they had back then,
although they must have existed. Anybody know?

I used to lay out my own boards, decals and black crepe tape on
pin-aligned mylar. There would be a padmaster (pads only) and a
separate sheet for each trace layer. We sent it out to Lorry Ray in
Mountain View to be photographed. They could also do cool ground plane
tricks, all with wet photography. We'd send the film out to the fab
house and expect to get it back.

I still have a few layouts around, to show the kids. It was labor
intensive.


(Around here, a lot of the people that you interview have worked for
Dolby. Turnover seems pretty high. They are like ILM, expecting people
to work for glory.)

Has Dolby done anything new or interesting in the past decade?

Big sound systems for movie theatres (a dying biz) and a new home 3D
sound system.


At the abusive prices it is no wonder that movie theaters are going
out of biz.

We go to the movie theater about once or twice a month. Movie
theaters aren't exactly going out of business here. In fact, new ones
are opening relatively often. As far as "abusive prices" go, I don't
consider $7 for a few hours of entertainment to be too bad.