23 Jun
2010
23 Jun
'10
12:56 p.m.
Tony Duell [ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk] wrote:
Wire-wrapping id fine, and very reliable. It's also pretty stable. Those
solderless plugblock breadboards are none of the above :-)
I am quite sure he needed to test and modify the design as he went along,
and maybe it;s easier to do that on a solderless breadboard (I doubt it,
actually, I had so many problems from bad connections on those darn
things)... But it's not had to 'edit' a design on stripboard. So perhaps
transfer each bit to stripboard as you get it finalised?
Cerrtainly if I'd managd to make a clone of a ULA in such a machine I
would not have kept it on a solderless breadboard, even if I'd used one
to develop the reverse-engineered design.
-tony
To tie into another thread, one of the photos of
the VCF-UK
that I saw (I
can't rememeber who took said picture) seemed to be of
Spectrum (?) ULA
built from simple logic chips on large plugblock breadboard.
While that's
undoubtedly a great hack, I do have to wonder why the chap
didn't solder
it up on stripboard or similar. Anyone who has the dedication and
knowledge to make a copy of the ULA is capable of learning to solder.
And the resuylt would be a lot more permanent and probably more
reliable.
At DEC I did see (but never snagged) the wire-wrapped DHV11 protoype
(filled a BA23-size chassis). It had been wire-wrapped by an external
wire-wrapping house and then the various snags were fixed up in house.
Perhaps the ULA builder was also a reverse-engineer and found it easier
to wire-wrap whilst working out the design rather than building on
stripboard? (Was the ULA design ever made public?)