I made wirewrap boards back in the early 90s and it was extremely tedious, both following the netlist instructions to do the initial work, and then the inevitab

I made wirewrap boards back in the early 90s and it was extremely tedious, both following the netlist instructions to do the initial work, and then the inevitable debugging when it didn't work. Of course you can have two kinds of bugs - either you made a mistake doing the wirewrap, or your design has a problem! For the complexity of the boards I did, I think it took 2-3 days to do the initial wirewrap, and then days or weeks to debug and get it working. It was, however, both cheaper and easier than doing a prototype PCB. For that, I'd have to use the institution's darkroom with their flatbed photoplotter connected to a PDP-something that you had to boot from reel-to-reel tape. The plot happened overnight, and then had to be developed next day in the darkroom, and then if you were lucky you'd have transparencies of each layer of the PCB that you could send off to a local company who would etch you a single PCB for a lot of money in a few weeks. Even that wasn't trouble-free, since PCBs can have manufacturing faults, or you could screw up when soldering the components to the board, or your design could be wrong. It was very rare that I as the most junior person was allowed to go the PCB route. I think for my boards it happened only once on an ECL design that simply wouldn't have been possible with wirewrap. Although I was tasked with doing the transparencies for other team members. Since I was being paid only £40/week through a government benefits scheme, it was much cheaper to pay for my time than to pay an external company. Also as the other reply says, I used CPLDs a lot which were much faster to iterate. With practice you could pull out the QFP package, put it in the programmer, recompile and upload the new logic, and put it back into the board in an hour. Luxury! We never used pencil and paper (except for notes). The software for drawing schematics, laying out PCBs, making netlists, and compiling CPLDs was pretty advanced even then. Although all of it was horribly proprietary. No KiCAD for you. Taught you to check everything in your design early and often.