3 ms·

The existence of wire wrap tells you a lot how painfully tedious it was to layout PCB's at the time. I did a couple of wire wrap boards. But eventually just sta

The existence of wire wrap tells you a lot how painfully tedious it was to layout PCB's at the time. I did a couple of wire wrap boards. But eventually just started soldering wire wrap wire to the sockets. By the early 90's it was faster to layout a PCB and have it fabbed. Bonus you could outsource that and use the 3-4 weeks to do less tedious things. This is just around the time that programmable logic became readily available. It'd be much easier to iterate with that than wiring up logic gates. Last 30 years you can do all this debugging with simulations and then test using FPGA's.

FarmerPotato 1y ago
I'm old-young enough to be aware of the evolution of minicomputers implemented in MSI TTL with wire-wrap (1970) to VLSI integration (1975). Examples are the LSI-11 and TMS9900. My first home-brew micro was done in 1987 using the Radio Shack hand-tool and an OK Industries' motorized wrap gun. Now, I add CPLD to my wire-wrap designs! Just like on an iterated PCB, you must lock the physical pins to functions.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  Some DEC CPUs were wire-wrapped until VLSI became a thing. The KL-10 was notoriously an ECL wire-wrap design. But they had a semi-automated machine to handle it. I don't think anyone mass-produced non-trivial numbers of wire-wrap boards by hand. It's fine for prototypes, but it's a very error-prone process and makes it difficult to handle noise, especially at fast clock speeds.
FarmerPotato 1y ago
Present day: I can fabricate a wire-wrap version from my PCB footprints, much faster than I can route the PCB! With wire-wrap, you can route multiple traces between the same pins, or I like to neatly bundle a whole bus' worth. I'm far more pleased with the results of my wire-wrap, than the quality of my SMT soldering once I get a PCB made. I had a tutor for wire-wrap in the 1980s. But I'm self-taught in PCB routing, and I start it over at least 3 times.
pjmlp 1y ago
When I was a kid helping my father with in-house electronics, early 1980's, this meant using specific pens and paper to layout them into boards, and then do chemical baths, drying the boards, and then hope for the best when starting to solder components on top. Usually a mistake in any step would mean throw away the whole board and start from scratch.

FarmerPotato 1y ago

I'm old-young enough to be aware of the evolution of minicomputers implemented in MSI TTL with wire-wrap (1970) to VLSI integration (1975). Examples are the LSI-11 and TMS9900. My first home-brew micro was done in 1987 using the Radio Shack hand-tool and an OK Industries' motorized wrap gun. Now, I add CPLD to my wire-wrap designs! Just like on an iterated PCB, you must lock the physical pins to functions.

TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
Some DEC CPUs were wire-wrapped until VLSI became a thing. The KL-10 was notoriously an ECL wire-wrap design. But they had a semi-automated machine to handle it. I don't think anyone mass-produced non-trivial numbers of wire-wrap boards by hand. It's fine for prototypes, but it's a very error-prone process and makes it difficult to handle noise, especially at fast clock speeds.

FarmerPotato 1y ago

Present day: I can fabricate a wire-wrap version from my PCB footprints, much faster than I can route the PCB! With wire-wrap, you can route multiple traces between the same pins, or I like to neatly bundle a whole bus' worth. I'm far more pleased with the results of my wire-wrap, than the quality of my SMT soldering once I get a PCB made. I had a tutor for wire-wrap in the 1980s. But I'm self-taught in PCB routing, and I start it over at least 3 times.

pjmlp 1y ago

When I was a kid helping my father with in-house electronics, early 1980's, this meant using specific pens and paper to layout them into boards, and then do chemical baths, drying the boards, and then hope for the best when starting to solder components on top. Usually a mistake in any step would mean throw away the whole board and start from scratch.