I probably still have my wire-wrap gun in storage somewhere but I would much rather use an FPGA. If you don't mind, answering, why do you still use this tech instead of FPGAs?

As for cold solder joints: no, they don't do that. But when you start making modifications you have to be extremely careful not to cause any damage because tracing a loose joint on a wire wrap board is the stuff of nightmares.

For a clumsy person like me wire-wrap seems even harder than the usual stuff around soldering, that said I'll look into it more because it seems incredibly interesting.

Also it's nice hearing about Ben Heck in the wild, when I first started fiddling with Arduino I watched his YouTube videos on the element14 channel. Though from what I remember he's long since left. Another channel that I remember fondly is EEVblog even though both were about electronics the content itself didn't have much overlap if I recall correctly.

Well, lucky Amiga, it was wasted by executive muck-ups rather than mere marketing foibles.

Thanks for sharing that! Never got to see any pro wrapping.

By the time this stuff started, I'd started forgetting all the hobbyist hardware electronics I'd learned (thinking it would last) and had moved to software ... at right about the time that manu's stopped documenting their internals ... but while disassemblers still existed.

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.

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.

I remember seeing old photos of the prototype. I assumed it was lost decades ago.

Dale Luck (from the original team) is preserving it, apparently.

I had an old Kenwood amplifier for years that had wire wrap board to board connectors; it worked great.

I never owned an Amiga, but it was clear at the time it was a masterpiece, and this just confirms it.

Designing the chips in MSI, wire wrapping a prototype, and getting it all to work to the point where you get a functional chip run is the stuff of legends.

> makes me believe in parallel universes

And we're obviously in the less cool branch. :-)