Amusing Find...
while rummaging thru one of my catch-all drawers.
Back in the '60's and '70's when chip layout were done by hand, drawn on stabilene. ...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at
I'm looking for work... see my website.
Den fredag den 19. august 2016 kl. 22.51.29 UTC+2 skrev Jim Thompson:
-Lasse
I have a whole set of those around here somewhere. I never found those terribly useful for drawing schematics... too much back and forth to the template... so I tended (and still do) draw preliminary schematics totally by hand. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I'm looking for work... see my website.
Den fredag den 19. august 2016 kl. 23.34.29 UTC+2 skrev Jim Thompson:
yeh either fast by hand or pretty by computer
used those for school sometime early 90's
-Lasse
"school sometime early 90's" ? You're not much older than my grandchildren ;-) ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I'm looking for work... see my website.
wn
born 1975
-Lasse
So you are older... first grandchild born 1990.
First child born 1962
First great-grandchild born 2014 ;-) ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I'm looking for work... see my website.
This a maybe a third of my collection of templates and rulers and lettering guides.
I don't use these much any more, but they're cool and hang on nails on the wall so don't take up space.
I still draw schematics freehand on gridded D-size vellum, and don't need templates for that.
A few weeks back I showed the kids a pcb tapeup on mylar: padmaster, top traces, bottom traces, assembly layer, title block layer. They were amazed.
That was all *such* a PITA. I don't miss any of that.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
When I was starting work as an engineer we were doing manually drawn schematics. I was fed up with the tedium involved in drawing logic like
8 bit buffers. I got the idea of drawing a sheet of them and Xeroxing them onto labels which could be stuck on a page. I proposed it to my boss thinking he would be behind anything that saved time. He stuck it in a pile on his desk and I never heard from him about it again.My revenge was not long in coming. I had done lots of keyboarding in school and even a prior job. We looked at one of the early CAD system. It was pretty much GUI, but you would have to type the name of a symbol you wanted. He was turned off by that small amount of typing as he thought typing was for secretaries (we actually had a group of word processors using Wangs). We got the CAD system and he never touched it. He was afraid of a keyboard.
-- Rick C
One of my least successful projects was a 27MHz pager based on an Interdesign Monochip. Connect the dots from a standard menu of devices. 1973-74 methinks. I still have the cookbook of common circuits, some of the layouts, and a few prototype pagers. It took me about 3 months to figure out that I can't build a 455KHz IF amplifier using Monochip devices the size of power transistors.
While you were making chips, I was using similar "tape up" tools and templates to make PCBs and schematics:
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I have come to the conclusion that someone has seriously F'ed with the dropbox website code to make it totally useless for Win2K users. Now nothing is displayed.
There were several different Interdesign arrays. The real challenge was to route _many_ devices with just single-layer metalization.
I can't recall the company name now (MANY years ago) without going to my storage facility and rummaging thru many file cabinets, but there was a two-man operation there in San Jose that did audiophool-type circuits and I did a couple of chips for them on the Interdesign array.
Also wa-a-ay back I did two chip designs for Plantronics... out your way. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I'm looking for work... see my website.
I started out hand drawing schematics but never thought drawing buffers was all that tedious. It's a rectangle. Even gates weren't much of a problem with a proper template, though for final schematics they wanted boxes for everything, including resistors and capacitors. Our schematics were converted to netlists, manually, so didn't really serve much purpose, outside our needs. It didn't take long to get a GUI logic entry tool. It took longer for everyone to get the hardware to run it, though. The conversion happened in '77 - '79. The graphics terminals we used were 3277 green screens (80x24 line) with custom hardware to drive 19" Tektronix storage tubes. Eventually, all of the designers got one but it took a while. We had a couple of technicians who eventually built a couple of hundred of the things.
In a later job, we had a manager like that. We wanted every engineer to have a PC (these weren't circuit designers) to interface to the mainframes and indirectly to a VAX (ATE system). One manager said that "his" engineers weren't secretaries[*] and they would *not* get terminals. They didn't, until they started yelling "where's mine?".
[*] Remember, this was IBM, in the '80s.
Do you remember Bishop Graphics? Everybody hated Bishop Graphics.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Hah, do you mean the not-so-"quick circuit"? Have the original Mac version diskettes in my junk box(s)!
Bishop sold the absolute best PCB layout tape and decals, way better than the Chartpak stuff. They were super expensive and their sales people were predators. A sales guy would drop in and tell us that, if we didn't buy our blueline supplies from them too, we wouldn't get delivery on the layout stuff we'd ordered.
As soon as CAD came along, everybody dumped Bishop with genuine enthusiasm. No way we'd buy their software.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
I only seen one 2X's layout on tape and that used the Bishop pad things and such. Pretty much every thing went CAD at that time.
Cheers
I'm still running XP, and have no problems like you always seem to have. What browser are you using?
Yes. I had rolls of tape and sheets of stick on pads from Bishop Graphics. Also some red and blue rubylith from Bishop. I didn't really hate them, but did my best to avoid dealing with them. I used Circuit Stick whenever possible. About 10 years ago, I hauled several large boxes full of PCB layout materials, mylar, stick-on pads, and such to the dump, after failing to sell the stuff on Craigslist. Nobody wanted it. The stuff on my site (above) was one last board that I was saving for a customer, who after about 20 years, decided that it was time to trash it.
The templates in the pictures were used to make the silk screens for the PCB's. I had both 2:1 and 4:1 templates for common components. It was quicker and easier to do the silk screen with templates, instead of stick ons, but with a catch. If I had to move a component, it was either do it all from scratch, or carefully edit vellum or mylar with an Exacto knife.
Even after computahs were introduced into PCB layout, I still did quite a bit of tape, rubylith, and Exacto knife work. The problem was that computers were great for dealing with a large number of pins and wires, but not so good with RF layout. For a long time, RF was mostly done by hand.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Yep. Monochip A, B, C, and D. I forgot which one's I was using.
Sequential Circuits perhaps? I've repaired (restored) two of their synthesizers in the last 15 or so years. However, I never had anything to do with the company.
Oh yes. I know them well. They also didn't hire me at one point thanks to my lack of diplomacy. The engineer/manager with whom I was interviewing dragged out a schematic and asked me what I thought of it. I declared it to be junk, over designed, far too complicated, with far too many adjustments, and a few totally unnecessary sections. I also checked off a fair number of parts that could be removed without much effect on operation. Then, he told me that it was his design and that he didn't appreciate my comments. Moral: Look at the schematic title block signature before criticizing.
I just found two copies of Interdesign "101 Analog IC Designs". I believe the book might have been created on my suggestion. A large part of the target audience for the Monochip "uncommitted IC logic" family was electronic designers that knew nothing about IC design. I fit the description perfectly. One day, I blurted out to someone that it would be nice to have some kind of "cookbook" from which to plagerize circuits. Many months later, I was presented with a copy of the book. It would have been a very useful book, but by then, I was on to other projects that didn't involve Monochip.
With luck, I might be able to find where I buried the CB pager prototype that was built around a Monochip.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
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