4 ms·
So little? That machines you see in the pictures did cost millions of dollars each. Each wire strand had to be carefully put in place and soldered or specially
by cracrecry 5y ago
So little? That machines you see in the pictures did cost millions of dollars each.
Each wire strand had to be carefully put in place and soldered or specially wire wrapped manually:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_wrap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_wrap
If you make a mistake, it was so painful. Today we use PCBs and if we make a mistake, we just reuse 99% of the PCB design. Once it is done, repeating the PCB design cost you almost nothing.
In the past,when you needed to make something again, you needed to make all the connections again manually. That increased the cost so much and made stupid errors abundant as humans make stupid errors all the time.
It will also took a long time for a computer to be done.
People working there having access to computers were privileged people. Now I can control a huge CNC machine, the watering of the plants and a 3D printer with a computer that fits on my hand and cost peanuts.
That is magic for me.
- m4rtink 5y agoWell, you could hot-wire some of these designs. Much harder to fixup a PCB in general, without throwing it away with all the components.
- throw0101a 5y ago> Each wire strand had to be carefully put in place and soldered or specially wire wrapped manually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_wrap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_wrap It seems to be that wire wrapping isn't very popular nowadays, and that hobbyists tend to use breadboards [1]. Is there a particular reason for that? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadboard
- dboreham 5y agoComponents are too small to solder or weld a wire to by hand.
- trasz 5y agoYou’d still need to solder components to the posts, and only then you could do the wirewrap connections between those posts. It just doesn’t make any sense. I believe even “back then” the wire wrap was only used on backplanes; modules plugged into those were through-hole PCBs plugged directly into the posts that were wrapped around in the other side.
- trasz 5y agoQuite the contrary, wirewrapped boards were easily patchable. And computers (not sure about SAGE, but this was common with Digital) used to be patched at customers premises; patches usually used differently colored insulation.