4 ms·

Wirewrap is actually very reliable. From Wikipedia: > Wire wrap construction can produce assemblies which are more reliable than printed circuits: connections

Wirewrap is actually very reliable. From Wikipedia: > Wire wrap construction can produce assemblies which are more reliable than printed circuits: connections are less prone to fail due to vibration or physical stresses on the base board, and the lack of solder precludes soldering faults such as corrosion, cold joints and dry joints. The connections themselves are firmer and have lower electrical resistance due to cold welding of the wire to the terminal post at the corners. It was used on satellites until fairly recently.

deepspace 4y ago
Back in the 80s / 90s, I worked for a company that made custom compute boards for military applications. The boards had to withstand the vibration levels, temperature extremes and other stresses encountered in a main battle tank. They were all wire wrapped. Frequencies were low, though-about 25MHz max.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
Yup, very reliable for low(ish) frequencies around 20MHz. I built 68010 and 68020 prototype systems using the DIL packages. Those were better for wire-wrap than the later pin grid versions of the 020 because you didn't get such a density of wires fanning out. A great text book we used circa 1990 was Alan Clements "Microprocessor Systems Design" (PWS Kent). It's an almost faultless book based on his practical systems lectures at Teeside Poly, full of schematics from which you can build working 68000 computers using pairs of 8 bit DRAM and EPROMS of the time.
- richrichardsson 4y ago
  This is interesting. I presume in the example shown they stuck to 1MHz as it would be more reliable than clocking to the kind of speed you mentioned, again presumably because the nature of a bunch of discrete components meant the switching of logic levels imposed a hard limit? Another sibling mentioned the Amiga prototypes, I'm again presuming that the ~7MHz that that chipset ran at was well within the acceptable ranges for clock speed using discrete components?
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    <grabs book and dusts-off failing pages...> On page pp 142-3 is the minimal config schematic that shows "oscillator module" (IC4) but it isn't in the BOM. However pp 108 (fig 4.2) shows it as 8MHz. IIRC it was a MAX 6 pin 4MHz module I used, later I cranked it up to 10MHz on a 8MHz 68k uP and it still worked. Crazy overclocking!
- kjs3 4y ago
  Clements book is indeed excellent. I doubt I'd have been as successful homebrewing a 68k back in the day without it.

deepspace 4y ago

Back in the 80s / 90s, I worked for a company that made custom compute boards for military applications. The boards had to withstand the vibration levels, temperature extremes and other stresses encountered in a main battle tank. They were all wire wrapped. Frequencies were low, though-about 25MHz max.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

Yup, very reliable for low(ish) frequencies around 20MHz. I built 68010 and 68020 prototype systems using the DIL packages. Those were better for wire-wrap than the later pin grid versions of the 020 because you didn't get such a density of wires fanning out. A great text book we used circa 1990 was Alan Clements "Microprocessor Systems Design" (PWS Kent). It's an almost faultless book based on his practical systems lectures at Teeside Poly, full of schematics from which you can build working 68000 computers using pairs of 8 bit DRAM and EPROMS of the time.

richrichardsson 4y ago
This is interesting. I presume in the example shown they stuck to 1MHz as it would be more reliable than clocking to the kind of speed you mentioned, again presumably because the nature of a bunch of discrete components meant the switching of logic levels imposed a hard limit? Another sibling mentioned the Amiga prototypes, I'm again presuming that the ~7MHz that that chipset ran at was well within the acceptable ranges for clock speed using discrete components?
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  <grabs book and dusts-off failing pages...> On page pp 142-3 is the minimal config schematic that shows "oscillator module" (IC4) but it isn't in the BOM. However pp 108 (fig 4.2) shows it as 8MHz. IIRC it was a MAX 6 pin 4MHz module I used, later I cranked it up to 10MHz on a 8MHz 68k uP and it still worked. Crazy overclocking!
kjs3 4y ago
Clements book is indeed excellent. I doubt I'd have been as successful homebrewing a 68k back in the day without it.