Moderators: Dave Moll, Andrew Davie, Steve Anderson
Steve Anderson wrote:I used wire-wrapping quite a lot in the 80s, it's fast and creates boards of high density. The downside is the wire is quite expensive and so is the powered cut/strip/wrap tool. Just the bit alone was almost 200 pounds, and that was in the 80s!
Wire-wrapping is considered more reliable than soldering and the AGC (Apollo Guidance Computer) was built with it. Instead of just one soldered joint wire-wrapping creates around 40 cold-welds , one on each corner of the square peg/pin, 4 per wrap-turn with a 10-turn wrap.
You don't see it much these days as creating PCBs is so quick, easy and cheap...well, for those who can use Eagle and the like...not me yet.
Steve A.
Robonz wrote:Great looking scope Harry. It looks really clean.
Just a little feedback on wire wrap. The connections actually get better with age. It something to do with the silver coating on the wire leaching into the pin or something like that. My chemistry expert friend explained it to me many years ago. The wire and wire wrap tools are pretty cheap these days on ebay and online etc. Old school TV's I worked on actually had wire wrap in their volume production e.g. Sanyo TV's' had a lot of wire wrap. Anyway, it is just another way to do stuff. Something that I prefer. Its not much easier than your method. It is just more reliable and easier to manage changes when you realise you stuck the wire on the wrong pin.
Cheers
Keith
Andrew Davie wrote:I have a gorgeous 1975 computer - still working last I tried it about 10 years ago - which is totally wire-wrapped. A Datanumerics DL-8A. I think it's the only one left in the world. Serial #29 - something like that. Front panel toggle switches and LEDs.
Harry Dalek wrote:Andrew Davie wrote:I have a gorgeous 1975 computer - still working last I tried it about 10 years ago - which is totally wire-wrapped. A Datanumerics DL-8A. I think it's the only one left in the world. Serial #29 - something like that. Front panel toggle switches and LEDs.
I had a google Andrew as i was curious to see this beast ? it looks to be an analog computer ?
Andrew Davie wrote:That's the one. No, it's not an analog machine - it has an 8080 inside, and 8-bit registers, 16-bit addresses, as shown on the front panel.
You flip the switches to set the 8-bit value, flip the switches to set the 16-bit address, and then hit "deposit"... and it writes a single byte. It auto-steps the address so you only need to flip the 8-bit value to the new value and hit deposit again. When you've entered your program, flip the address switches to the start address, and hit "RUN". Pretty awesome
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