3 ms·

Since I started college and really knew what breadboards were I always believed they were only every used in schools or else for prototyping, anything in produc

by vxNsr 8y ago

Since I started college and really knew what breadboards were I always believed they were only every used in schools or else for prototyping, anything in production/commercial used etched silicon, that assumption was killed today. It now makes sense why it cost $20,000/month (today's $) to use this computer, if you had to manually build each board, the cost for that alone is astronomical... I think I owe my ECE 101 professor an apology.

Animats 8y ago
There are no "breadboards" in an IBM 1401. There's a wire-wrap backplane, but that's a production technology. Even manual wire wrapping is very organized. You have a list of X-Y coordinates to attach, and a supply of pre-cut and pre-stripped wires of the right length. You put in all the shortest wires first, then the next length, and so on. A wire-wrap gun-like tool does the twisting and stops when the wire is tight. It's easy, and the result is reliable. Much better than those solderless breadboards the Arduino crowd uses. By the IBM 360 era, IBM had much of the production process automated. Wire-wrap backplanes were wired by a Gardner-Denver CNC wire-wrapping machine. IBM's "solid logic technology",a pre-IC technology, placed components in little ceramic bases which were then canned. IBM pioneered automated weaving of core memory. For 15 years, IBM was way ahead on automated electronics manufacturing, and extremely profitable. All this was a dead end. Making ICs by photolithography became cheaper in the 1970s.
- kens 8y ago
  Good answer. A couple additional notes: the 1401's backplane was also wire-wrapped by a Gardner-Denver machine controlled by punch cards. Field engineers could modify the wiring with hand wire-wrap tools (to fix problems or add new features), but most wiring was automated. IBM was using CAD for their systems way back; the 1401's wiring diagrams were called Automated Logic Diagrams because they were computer-generated, originally using a vacuum tube IBM 704 or 705 computer. I'm still not sure if IBM's solid logic technology (SLT) was a good idea, or if they should have moved to integrated circuits much sooner.
stevenwoo 8y ago
I worked on a project in the mid 90's where we were prototyping a single board replacement for a PC and several specialty boards and we used a breadboard that was about 12 inches by 8 inches and we kept adding components until we had problems with the digital lines being too noisy - things stopped working consistently so we looked and the 1/0 levels were obviously pretty dirty on the oscilliscope so we had to switch to using wirewrap for the prototypes. This happened again with wirewrap so then we switched to PCB prototypes. Obviously this depends on clock speed for the data lines and application (we had a couple of CPU's, memory, and a/d, d/a, NTSC, forget how far we got with just a breadboard.)

by vxNsr 8y ago

Animats 8y ago

There are no "breadboards" in an IBM 1401. There's a wire-wrap backplane, but that's a production technology. Even manual wire wrapping is very organized. You have a list of X-Y coordinates to attach, and a supply of pre-cut and pre-stripped wires of the right length. You put in all the shortest wires first, then the next length, and so on. A wire-wrap gun-like tool does the twisting and stops when the wire is tight. It's easy, and the result is reliable. Much better than those solderless breadboards the Arduino crowd uses. By the IBM 360 era, IBM had much of the production process automated. Wire-wrap backplanes were wired by a Gardner-Denver CNC wire-wrapping machine. IBM's "solid logic technology",a pre-IC technology, placed components in little ceramic bases which were then canned. IBM pioneered automated weaving of core memory. For 15 years, IBM was way ahead on automated electronics manufacturing, and extremely profitable. All this was a dead end. Making ICs by photolithography became cheaper in the 1970s.

kens 8y ago
Good answer. A couple additional notes: the 1401's backplane was also wire-wrapped by a Gardner-Denver machine controlled by punch cards. Field engineers could modify the wiring with hand wire-wrap tools (to fix problems or add new features), but most wiring was automated. IBM was using CAD for their systems way back; the 1401's wiring diagrams were called Automated Logic Diagrams because they were computer-generated, originally using a vacuum tube IBM 704 or 705 computer. I'm still not sure if IBM's solid logic technology (SLT) was a good idea, or if they should have moved to integrated circuits much sooner.

stevenwoo 8y ago

I worked on a project in the mid 90's where we were prototyping a single board replacement for a PC and several specialty boards and we used a breadboard that was about 12 inches by 8 inches and we kept adding components until we had problems with the digital lines being too noisy - things stopped working consistently so we looked and the 1/0 levels were obviously pretty dirty on the oscilliscope so we had to switch to using wirewrap for the prototypes. This happened again with wirewrap so then we switched to PCB prototypes. Obviously this depends on clock speed for the data lines and application (we had a couple of CPU's, memory, and a/d, d/a, NTSC, forget how far we got with just a breadboard.)