They were called crepe tapes, so I'm guessing they were paper based. CAD was a huge improvement from laying down crepe tape and pads. (Been there!) This Wikipedia article might explain the crinkled flexibility?
Yeah, lots of disjointed comments while watching the video (sorry). I also used the address and data juggling to keep the tracks simple on a single sided PCB on my fairground lighting controllers and the retrofit echo board for Centaur pinball machines.
@@bigclivedotcom The contract PCB designer* we used back in the early 80s to do initial layouts used the tape's flexibility to do neat curved mitred corners, which meant I had to use the same technique on any mods to keep the board looking the same all over. Still got the tool for doing it, made from a broken flat needle file. * Doug Roberts
Watford electronics....that's a blast from the past! I distinctly remember this exact buffer being used in our computer studies classroom. It was attached to a Beeb which was the file-server (which had a huge 20MB mfm hard drive). It's fascinating to find out who it's creator was after 30-odd years.....and now, I feel the need to watch the infamous frankenbeeb video again. Thanks Mike and thanks too for taking the time to make this video.
I remember these days because dot matrix printers could be so horribly noisy that I actually made a custom serial cable from a phone extension cord and a couple of din connectors. I drilled through to the basement, ran the cord and had the other end come up in the linen closet. This way when I printed the noise was several feet away behind a closet and some absorbed by the towels in there. It worked like a charm.
Wow, Watford Electronics was huge in the 80's, I remember their multi-page ads in the computer magazines. That's a fantastic piece of hardware for the time, I could have done with one of them. My dad worked from home and we used to run off hundreds of invoices on the BBC micro, and I used to have to sit for hours watching the text crawling up the screen while sending pages to the Epson RX80 printer. Fun times.
Great bit of history. After getting hold of a HP8568A [edit: 1979] Spectrum Analyser (100Hz to 1.5GHz) from an Ebay seller whose grandfather passed away, it still sits, all 45kg of it, on my bench, waiting for new caps and rail testing. The guy who owned it before me is gone. So it goes. Thanks for the video Mike..meaningful stuff.
Watford Electronics was a mecca for geeks like me in the late 70s -- that little shop in Cardiff Road was like entering a cave of wonders (and worth the slog by bike from Hemel Hempstead where I lived -- most of a day spent getting there and back!). Did Joe design the production board for that? I forget his surname, but he did a lot of PCB work for WE. I worked with him at Dymar, elsewhere in Watford, but that was from 1980-84.
:D TTL-level clock. I remember as a child watching my father spent days being completely stumped trying to get a locally sourced (bootleg?) memory expansion board working (at some point removing a thick layer of original kludge wires and dead-bug mounted components); I don't recall if he ever succeeded, but I do remember him declaring that "it should be unnecessary to [meddle] with the pure clock signal. It's a signal. A signal, is that signal!" -- And him eventually accepting that the kludges were supposed to be there, from the manufacturer.
One of my first paid jobs as an indy contractor was for Dixons, who'd bought a bunch of serial thermal printers and wanted to bundle them with the Spectrum 128. I got commissioned to write a "printer driver" which the punter loaded before running any other software. I didn't know the full spec of the printer when I took the job on, so charged for doing a full bit of software dev... when I sat down to do it, it gradually dawned on me that it would work if I just patched a couple of system variables - two POKEs. I gussied it up a bit, but you really can't disguise that too much. It was Dixons. They never noticed. I doubt they cared.
@@NeuronalAxon It might very well have been. I had one and I probably got it for that project. But it's a long time ago now - best bet is to find some advertising from the months immediately after Sinclair sold up to Amstrad, which was when I did the job.
Did also use the tape, pads and the DALO pen as well, direct onto the copper. first board I forgot to mirror it, so instead of making a new one, I simply populated it, and as the only IC on it was a 723 and a CD4011, I simply took them and flipped the pins over, and put them into the socket. Was not going to leave the copper side on top, other option. The boards did work for over 30 years though. Second board in the unit I did get correct though, would have been hard to solder a relay upside down to the board, as all that board did was hold 2 relays and provide connections to the outside world, along with hold the fuses.
I forgot to mirror my first board, and populated the components on the copper side. The D connector had to be on trailing wires though, no way to get around that.
The Letraset style sheets for DIP packages also included pads with through tracks in place which vastly simplified placing tracks, though I can recall the tedium of picking incorrect taping from the sheets. Who remembers the etch resist felt tip pens? Happy days.
Bought my BBC B and 100K floppy drive there in 1983 had the RAM increased to 1mb at a cost of £54, really the start of my computing career. Thank you Watford Electronics.
I remeber sometime in the late 1980s taking the tube to Watford to visit Watford Electronics shop and buy this buffer along with a DFS board for the BBC micro! It was an order from a friend living abroad.
SGS Thompson and Signetics logos took me to my childhood memories. In my childhood I got few of those drafting aids along with few DIL stickers in 2x scale. I knew what they were but I was very little kid to use them for real purpose. Its good to see how you made that real product and got paid for it.
Nice. I still have an HR5 kicking around somewhere, complete with its linear power supply that's about 4 times the weight of the printer itself. My grandfather used it with an Oric Atmos to print address labels for newsletters of a club he was secretary of. Amazingly some of the left over unsealed tapes I have for it still work. 30 CPS feels like it might even be an exaggeration though...
I remember those tapes. I bet a lot of us are now expert car pin-stripers and don't even realize it... And early DRM! Someone pulls the EPROM expecting to steal a copy, and the code is all scrambled because of the MikeAddressing(tm).
Excellent. I believe I saw adds for that product and I would drool on them. For its time, that prototype is very professional. Congratulations on the good works. I had a first generation Centronics printer connected a Radio Shack Color Computer 1 through a serial to parallel converter. No buffer. If I had to print something, usually huge mathematical look up tables, I would start it in the morning before I went to work. Sometimes, it was done when I came home. Sometimes not. The printer only printed in one direction took something like three or four seconds per line! Continental drift was faster.
Boards like this… That beautiful gold and fiberglass… Those gorgeous ceramic chips… Jesus Christ the engineering… This is why I go to my local electronics Scrapyard five days a week. This stuff is Art!
One of my first commercial products was also a print buffer, we sold two variants , one for standard parallel ports and the other aimed at the PET using IEEE interface. The design was almost identical but I used a 6502
Very nice trip down memory lane. Nicely done for the day kids now have no idea what it was like in the 70's &80's designing and implementing hardware. My first gig out of college was fixing tape drums , water traces and keeping the token cabling in one piece for IBM 740 and 709's (crap I'm older than dirt)
Crikey, I remember that tape stuff for my first homemade custom PCB (a 6502-based computer) in, I think around 1990. Didn't realise you could use it in that curvy way - I made that rookie mistake of making my traces all have right angles (although whether it would have mattered on a 1MHz bus, I'm not sure, screwed up the etch and never got it work). I also had never considered that it doesn't matter which way around you put the pins on RAM, that's such a great insight. Really enjoy your videos, thanks!
I used to live in Watford and used W E on a regular basis for small components when they started in Cardiff Road Watford, they then moved to larger premises in lower high st watford , they then outgrew that building and moved to Luton and then folded up owing millions .....
A home town company called Estes Electronics made C-64 IEC serial bus interfaces for Centronics interface parallel printers using that same chip back the day. I believe that their cross-town rival Xetec also used them. Ah the early days of microcontrollers when resources were extremely spartan.
Printing from IOS directly to an AirPrint device actually produces a print dialogue box and stops you doing anything else until the printer has woken up and buffered the job,
I still have some Bishop Graphics adhesive backed copper foil tape in various slit sizes that’s primarily used for repair or rework. Using that along with the corresponding copper donut pads, one can make a quick and dirty PCB in minutes. With no drill holes required, SMT makes it even more useful. PCB CAD obviated the need for Bishop Graphics, so it’s al in the past now.
Even the most basic CAD system was a great boost to productivity. In 1985 I used a package called Smartwork. The grid was fixed at 50 mils and the software had few options. For other spacings I would tape a decal on the final plot. The output was to a pen plotter, it would sometimes take an hour to finish. If there was problem with the pen you would have to start again. It was still better than tape and decals.
As a schoolboy in the late 70s I was very proud of my hand drawn circuit boards. Many were copied from ETI and similar publications. It was something that allowed the artistic side some freedom. Wish I knew where my ETI induction balance metal detector went...? Among other things..
Thanks for taking me back. I used to design pcb's (we used to call them printed wiring board) using 'Circutape'. Always at least twice full size and photographically reduced.
Printer buffer projects were all the rage back in the day, did one myself, but IIRC it ended up one of those unfinished projects. I think I got to a vero board proto though.
The origins of why PCB layout is called artwork... Kids these days have no idea how good they have it, all from the many decades of our hard work making things easier and better...
Did my last tape and film design around 1998 but only threw out the tapes, pads etc. ten years or so ago, along with the fan-cooled DIY A1 lightbox and 0.1" grid. Supplier names that come to mind are Chartpak and Brady.
@@sootikins Not heard of Kroy here in the UK. As for Letraset lettering the technique for legends etc. was to lay them out on a spare bit of film then pick them up on 3M matt 'invisible' tape. You could then position/reposition almost as many times as you liked.
Hmm yes, tapes, Letraset, clear film, scalpels, ferric chloride..... and Dalo pens for one-offs - scary stuff. I still remember Signetics and SGS - and when RS insisted on stamping their own part numbers on devices.
Very cool, Mike. I used to make the trek out to buy stuff from Watford Electronics. Was something I always looked forward to. I still have the 68K processor and RAM that I bought from them way back when.
That's pretty awesome. Thanks for sharing things you found around the house. I always like the videos you have where your just explaining stuff. I enjoyed the led install video at the hotel where you jumped a diesel semi from a drill battery.
Great nostalgia! The pcb drafting tape is crepe tape with pressure-sensitive adhesive backing. Reminded of first job before university where I learned to do pcb layout with this tape and also the red/blue plastic tape for 2-layer.
That brings back memories of my early electronics design projects. I used same colour tape for both sides of a double sided layout and just relied on the two sheets of film aligning, fixed in place with masking tape. You always knew if someone had been working on a layout with bits of that tape being stuck to the elbows! I'm still waiting for one of my products to show up in a radio rally, I'm sure it will one day.
I put a resist pen and some unetched pcb material in my pen plotter, ran the plot a few times also cleaning the pen. The fat Radio Shack pens worked the best, the ink was thicker. A bit of touchup and I got nice pcbs after etching.. They were even panelized. The drilling took more time. They were for a Pay TV descrambler.
That's architectural/engineering tape. I don't remember if Letraset made them, but i remember (when i was a kid) playing with my parent's discards. Making name cartouches with the tape and letters with the Letraset sets.
2000 pounds from 1985 would correspond to roughly 6000 pounds today! Not too shabby for a student! How did you prototype these things back in the day? Breadboards? Wire-wrap?
I remember buying components from the house in Cardiff road, in the mid 70's. My mun still has a clock built from a Practical Electronics magazine which is still going strong since 1975. Used to spend most Saturdays sitting in their front room while waiting for the pocket money to turn in to components. Last used them when they had the shop in watford high street
Ah the good ol' days. I loved laying out the through hole boards, but I was doing it in the 90's so I was using Protel and everything was a mix of TH and SMT
Very interesting ! I was working for the British Government at the time doing electronic design, and at around the time you designed this board, I was working on a digital voice storage unit. The main thin I’d like to point out is that while I used DRAM I also used Z80 microcontrollers. They took away they headache of doing a refresh for you. Set them running, and then just access the RAM as you would a static device. I’d be interested to know if you considered using this processor as we relied on it for many years until Intel brought in the big boys.
You need lots of GPIO to talk to two printer buses, Z80 has none, you need an I/O peripheral for each 8 bits of GPIO IIRC, or to fashion some memory-mapped hardware from scratch. Microcontroller was just the ticket here.
Mark Tillotson The Z80 had two lines coming out of it, MREQ/ and IORQ/. With these two lines the processor could determine to access the DRAM or the I/O. In the case of the engineering problem here there would be an 74244 for the input and a 74374 for the output. The input would be interrupt buffered into DRAM and then pushed out at leisure to the printer (assuming it had ‘data waiting’ line to be used as a second interrupt). This is not a well thought out proof of concept, just a quick jot down of notes..... now it’s time to get out the breadboard !
Most of my prototyping boards were all wire wrapped instead of PCBs. Today, its just far quicker to design a PCB and get a prototype PCB back in a week or less. its very difficult & time consuming to home etch your own PCBs with 1000 or more traces which most are between 7 to 20 mils.
Interesting you went home made etched PCB and not wire wrapped for the prototype. I remember using the Bishop Graphics tapes and donut's for creating scaled up layouts and photo-reducing to a negative photo-tool.
You did well. In '86 I was on £4,500 per year making similar simple test equipment in a factory. Thanks to redundancy I escaped. It frightens me I might still be there.
@@優さん-n7m I escaped the closed world of factory life discovering that being a field service engineer provided a car and took me to offices, shops, banks, hotels and a whole world of interesting places to work and people to meet without constant supervision and clocking in and out on a time clock leading to being self employed. Escaped!
Hi, I did work like that on the job, in blue-red as well as at home in black crêpe tape, in the '70's/early '80's. Nowadays I would use a PC and Printer!
Forgot all about Watford Electronics! Remember buying a fair bit from them in the 90s. Always baffled me why they were called Watford Electronics and based in Luton! Shame it ended with the owners screwing over all their customers really.
Hi there Mike, Yeah i have got a set of electraset type transfers and are still available on ebay complete with ferric chloride "Back in the day" he he
Very cool! Thanks for sharing. Man I smashed my index finger yesterday with a 4lb sledge. Thank god I was wearing gloves. Hope your finger heals quick buddy
Oh! So that's how the wiggly lines were done! Gosh I wished I could've afforded a bunch of things from watford electronics :) You must've been over the moon with a £2k cheque!
Good ol' days! I started making (analog) PCB's even before rub-on symbols and tapes were available. Traces and pads were hand-painted with a black lacquer and a very fine brush, directly onto the copper, and then etched. Way ugly and many thin line interruptions having to be soldered over. Getting traces not to touch other pads was a true challenge. It was sort of like holding a brush in one hand and a scalpel to scratch excess away in the other. And then there was that smell of pressed phenol paper (pertinax, FR-2) when soldering, mmmhhh! Today I design my PCB's on CAD and have them etched in China, how boring life has become...
@@donmckee90 I used several manufacturers already. I had very good experiences with each of them. Just search aliexpress.com for "PCB service" or " PCB prototypes" or similar. Be informed that most of the manufacturers require Gerber files. Modern CAD systems export these directly or you can use an online Gerber converter for your file format.
@@NeuronalAxon Yeah, it batch-processed images scanned from old fashioned tachograph discs, it ran over night and switched itself off when finished! It vreated reports on driver hours, rest periods, speeding etc.
Now it is so easy. Layout the board in a couple of hours, then get prototype boards in a week or so for $25. It is not worth the time to to use a proto board. SMD is no problem. You also have the design in cad ready for productiion.
How did you get the contract? Did you read an announcement and thought a printer buffer is something you could built? I am student right now, so I am quite interested in the process and making some money myself ;)
Oh these old tapes... it was worst if a complete section had to move in case of more signals or circuits needed. I've done a lot of 6809 and 68k pcbs (music synthesisers ) in this technic. Thank silicicon for cad systems. Nice to see a lot of people started in a similar way. Sometimes I forget my roots...
@@NeuronalAxon Keyboards and sound editing systems. PPG in Hamburg/Germany. The company closed end of '87. PPG Wave 2.3 was the name of our last for a few years. In the last year we started with cad on a Unix system, but ist wasn't a real PCB cad based on netlists. It was more like pain in the a... Nowadays it's so easy
@@reinermunch5159 - Oh wow - PPG are amongst my favourite synths - I want a Waveterm system so badly! ;) It must've been interesting working for Wolfgang Palm?
@@NeuronalAxon Yes it was. I've learned a lot from Wolfgang. He could read a 6809 hex like a assembler code, including the conditional branches. Sometimes Wavesystems are on a marketplace here... but expensive. Wolfgang is still active and do impressive synth software for personal computers. I'm doing hard and firmware for medical devices today... since 30 years
Hi Mike I live near Sheffield and I was wondering if you have or know where I can get a large ferrite transformer or even just the core for a project Im building large as in 1200v 400A igbt module Half bridge 3300uf 450v caps etc
Oooh! Watford Electronics.... Memories from that wonderful era.
£2000 was quite frankly a shit-ton of money for that era. Particularly for a humble engineer type dude.
They were called crepe tapes, so I'm guessing they were paper based. CAD was a huge improvement from laying down crepe tape and pads. (Been there!) This Wikipedia article might explain the crinkled flexibility?
Yeah, lots of disjointed comments while watching the video (sorry). I also used the address and data juggling to keep the tracks simple on a single sided PCB on my fairground lighting controllers and the retrofit echo board for Centaur pinball machines.
Wasn't it possible to like buy a new car then with 2000£? Well, A Fiat Panda was supposedly 2995£ Inflation adjusted it would've been 6000£
@@bigclivedotcom The contract PCB designer* we used back in the early 80s to do initial layouts used the tape's flexibility to do neat curved mitred corners, which meant I had to use the same technique on any mods to keep the board looking the same all over. Still got the tool for doing it, made from a broken flat needle file.
* Doug Roberts
Watford electronics....that's a blast from the past! I distinctly remember this exact buffer being used in our computer studies classroom. It was attached to a Beeb which was the file-server (which had a huge 20MB mfm hard drive).
It's fascinating to find out who it's creator was after 30-odd years.....and now, I feel the need to watch the infamous frankenbeeb video again.
Thanks Mike and thanks too for taking the time to make this video.
was thinking the same.
Watford Electronics is a name that makes me feel very warm and fuzzy inside.
I remember these days because dot matrix printers could be so horribly noisy that I actually made a custom serial cable from a phone extension cord and a couple of din connectors. I drilled through to the basement, ran the cord and had the other end come up in the linen closet. This way when I printed the noise was several feet away behind a closet and some absorbed by the towels in there. It worked like a charm.
Ah the memories of taking master layouts out of the plastic bags and seeing a few stick-on pads left in the bag!
Wow, Watford Electronics was huge in the 80's, I remember their multi-page ads in the computer magazines. That's a fantastic piece of hardware for the time, I could have done with one of them. My dad worked from home and we used to run off hundreds of invoices on the BBC micro, and I used to have to sit for hours watching the text crawling up the screen while sending pages to the Epson RX80 printer. Fun times.
£2k in 1986 is nearly £6k today, and was about three months average salary at the time. Nice work!
Great bit of history. After getting hold of a HP8568A [edit: 1979] Spectrum Analyser (100Hz to 1.5GHz) from an Ebay seller whose grandfather passed away, it still sits, all 45kg of it, on my bench, waiting for new caps and rail testing. The guy who owned it before me is gone. So it goes. Thanks for the video Mike..meaningful stuff.
Watford Electronics was a mecca for geeks like me in the late 70s -- that little shop in Cardiff Road was like entering a cave of wonders (and worth the slog by bike from Hemel Hempstead where I lived -- most of a day spent getting there and back!). Did Joe design the production board for that? I forget his surname, but he did a lot of PCB work for WE. I worked with him at Dymar, elsewhere in Watford, but that was from 1980-84.
'86 I was still a student too. Did embedded C for a local engineering company for £115/week. Blew all the money on flying lessons! Happy days. :)
i would love to hear more about how you got started in developing stuff :D
:D TTL-level clock.
I remember as a child watching my father spent days being completely stumped trying to get a locally sourced (bootleg?) memory expansion board working (at some point removing a thick layer of original kludge wires and dead-bug mounted components); I don't recall if he ever succeeded, but I do remember him declaring that "it should be unnecessary to [meddle] with the pure clock signal. It's a signal. A signal, is that signal!" -- And him eventually accepting that the kludges were supposed to be there, from the manufacturer.
One of my first paid jobs as an indy contractor was for Dixons, who'd bought a bunch of serial thermal printers and wanted to bundle them with the Spectrum 128. I got commissioned to write a "printer driver" which the punter loaded before running any other software. I didn't know the full spec of the printer when I took the job on, so charged for doing a full bit of software dev... when I sat down to do it, it gradually dawned on me that it would work if I just patched a couple of system variables - two POKEs. I gussied it up a bit, but you really can't disguise that too much. It was Dixons. They never noticed. I doubt they cared.
Wasn't the Alphacom 32 thermal printer, was it?
@@NeuronalAxon It might very well have been. I had one and I probably got it for that project. But it's a long time ago now - best bet is to find some advertising from the months immediately after Sinclair sold up to Amstrad, which was when I did the job.
I had one of those printer buffers. Very useful indeed. Now I feel like I have met the architect of the product!
Did also use the tape, pads and the DALO pen as well, direct onto the copper. first board I forgot to mirror it, so instead of making a new one, I simply populated it, and as the only IC on it was a 723 and a CD4011, I simply took them and flipped the pins over, and put them into the socket. Was not going to leave the copper side on top, other option. The boards did work for over 30 years though. Second board in the unit I did get correct though, would have been hard to solder a relay upside down to the board, as all that board did was hold 2 relays and provide connections to the outside world, along with hold the fuses.
I forgot to mirror my first board, and populated the components on the copper side. The D connector had to be on trailing wires though, no way to get around that.
Two grand in 1986 I bet you couldnt stop smiling while of course playing it cool lol
You just flip a switch and it stops sending the buffer to the printer? This might be the first and only working "cancel print" button.
I doubt it. Mainframes would've most likely had something like it in the 60s already. I'm sure CuriousMarc has the speccifics!
@@rkan2 Not a button though... under George3 in the early 70's we had to issue a command at the ops console (KSR33 Teletype) to stop a print.
The Letraset style sheets for DIP packages also included pads with through tracks in place which vastly simplified placing tracks, though I can recall the tedium of picking incorrect taping from the sheets. Who remembers the etch resist felt tip pens? Happy days.
Bought my BBC B and 100K floppy drive there in 1983 had the RAM increased to 1mb at a cost of £54, really the start of my computing career. Thank you Watford Electronics.
Posh kid, hunh?
Watford Electronics - wow - blast from the past. Cool video
I remeber sometime in the late 1980s taking the tube to Watford to visit Watford Electronics shop and buy this buffer along with a DFS board for the BBC micro! It was an order from a friend living abroad.
SGS Thompson and Signetics logos took me to my childhood memories. In my childhood I got few of those drafting aids along with few DIL stickers in 2x scale. I knew what they were but I was very little kid to use them for real purpose. Its good to see how you made that real product and got paid for it.
Nice bit of nostalga Mike, thanks for sharing.
My first printer was a Brother HR5 (£150 1982) 30 CPS ! Cartridge tape based.
Nice. I still have an HR5 kicking around somewhere, complete with its linear power supply that's about 4 times the weight of the printer itself. My grandfather used it with an Oric Atmos to print address labels for newsletters of a club he was secretary of. Amazingly some of the left over unsealed tapes I have for it still work. 30 CPS feels like it might even be an exaggeration though...
Nice video! would love to see more of your Acorn designs for Watford Electronics - oooooo the green pages in the micro user were the best!
The Centre for Computing History has one of these buffers, exhibit CH33676.
I remember those tapes. I bet a lot of us are now expert car pin-stripers and don't even realize it...
And early DRM! Someone pulls the EPROM expecting to steal a copy, and the code is all scrambled because of the MikeAddressing(tm).
Excellent. I believe I saw adds for that product and I would drool on them. For its time, that prototype is very professional. Congratulations on the good works.
I had a first generation Centronics printer connected a Radio Shack Color Computer 1 through a serial to parallel converter. No buffer. If I had to print something, usually huge mathematical look up tables, I would start it in the morning before I went to work. Sometimes, it was done when I came home. Sometimes not. The printer only printed in one direction took something like three or four seconds per line! Continental drift was faster.
Those traces. Love the crudeness that went into the prototype board, it's
beautiful.
Boards like this… That beautiful gold and fiberglass… Those gorgeous ceramic chips… Jesus Christ the engineering…
This is why I go to my local electronics Scrapyard five days a week. This stuff is Art!
What kind of stuff do you find there?
One of my first commercial products was also a print buffer, we sold two variants , one for standard parallel ports and the other aimed at the PET using IEEE interface. The design was almost identical but I used a 6502
Very nice trip down memory lane. Nicely done for the day kids now have no idea what it was like in the 70's &80's designing and implementing hardware. My first gig out of college was fixing tape drums , water traces and keeping the token cabling in one piece for IBM 740 and 709's (crap I'm older than dirt)
Crikey, I remember that tape stuff for my first homemade custom PCB (a 6502-based computer) in, I think around 1990. Didn't realise you could use it in that curvy way - I made that rookie mistake of making my traces all have right angles (although whether it would have mattered on a 1MHz bus, I'm not sure, screwed up the etch and never got it work). I also had never considered that it doesn't matter which way around you put the pins on RAM, that's such a great insight. Really enjoy your videos, thanks!
I used to live in Watford and used W E on a regular basis for small components when they started in Cardiff Road Watford, they then moved to larger premises in lower high st watford , they then outgrew that building and moved to Luton and then folded up owing millions .....
A home town company called Estes Electronics made C-64 IEC serial bus interfaces for Centronics interface parallel printers using that same chip back the day. I believe that their cross-town rival Xetec also used them. Ah the early days of microcontrollers when resources were extremely spartan.
Printing from IOS directly to an AirPrint device actually produces a print dialogue box and stops you doing anything else until the printer has woken up and buffered the job,
I still have some Bishop Graphics adhesive backed copper foil tape in various slit sizes that’s primarily used for repair or rework. Using that along with the corresponding copper donut pads, one can make a quick and dirty PCB in minutes. With no drill holes required, SMT makes it even more useful. PCB CAD obviated the need for Bishop Graphics, so it’s al in the past now.
Had 2 BBC B’s for work, database called system delta and a dot matrix printer. 2 Double sided Double density floppy drives 1986
i remember how happy i was waaaay back when i was able to get a buffer, then afford a few extra k for it and not tie up the pc was a big deal way back
Even the most basic CAD system was a great boost to productivity.
In 1985 I used a package called Smartwork.
The grid was fixed at 50 mils and the software had few options.
For other spacings I would tape a decal on the final plot.
The output was to a pen plotter, it would sometimes take an hour to finish.
If there was problem with the pen you would have to start again.
It was still better than tape and decals.
As a schoolboy in the late 70s I was very proud of my hand drawn circuit boards. Many were copied from ETI and similar publications. It was something that allowed the artistic side some freedom.
Wish I knew where my ETI induction balance metal detector went...? Among other things..
Thats very beautiful and impressive. I bet Fran Blanche would like this lol
Ah yes, many happy hours spent next to an Epson dot matrix printer ... going steadily deaf ... happy days!
Fascinating ... thx for sharing.
Thanks for taking me back. I used to design pcb's (we used to call them printed wiring board) using 'Circutape'. Always at least twice full size and photographically reduced.
Printer buffer projects were all the rage back in the day, did one myself, but IIRC it ended up one of those unfinished projects. I think I got to a vero board proto though.
Hey, Dave!
Hoi! Its you!
The origins of why PCB layout is called artwork... Kids these days have no idea how good they have it, all from the many decades of our hard work making things easier and better...
1 person who disliked this video is probably the one who needed a voltage regulator and removed it
Dot matrix sounded like a jackhammer and shook the desk. Ah the old days.
Did my last tape and film design around 1998 but only threw out the tapes, pads etc. ten years or so ago, along with the fan-cooled DIY A1 lightbox and 0.1" grid. Supplier names that come to mind are Chartpak and Brady.
Don't forget Letraset and Kroy.
@@sootikins Not heard of Kroy here in the UK. As for Letraset lettering the technique for legends etc. was to lay them out on a spare bit of film then pick them up on 3M matt 'invisible' tape. You could then position/reposition almost as many times as you liked.
Hmm yes, tapes, Letraset, clear film, scalpels, ferric chloride..... and Dalo pens for one-offs - scary stuff. I still remember Signetics and SGS - and when RS insisted on stamping their own part numbers on devices.
Same here! In fact I reckon if I dug deep enough I could find that exact same transfer sheet!
Very cool, Mike. I used to make the trek out to buy stuff from Watford Electronics. Was something I always looked forward to. I still have the 68K processor and RAM that I bought from them way back when.
That's pretty awesome. Thanks for sharing things you found around the house. I always like the videos you have where your just explaining stuff. I enjoyed the led install video at the hotel where you jumped a diesel semi from a drill battery.
Very cool. Found one of your interclock boards in an old acorn the other day...
You should cover some of your Archimedes stuff :)
Great nostalgia! The pcb drafting tape is crepe tape with pressure-sensitive adhesive backing. Reminded of first job before university where I learned to do pcb layout with this tape and also the red/blue plastic tape for 2-layer.
A physical Print Spooler!
That brings back memories of my early electronics design projects. I used same colour tape for both sides of a double sided layout and just relied on the two sheets of film aligning, fixed in place with masking tape. You always knew if someone had been working on a layout with bits of that tape being stuck to the elbows! I'm still waiting for one of my products to show up in a radio rally, I'm sure it will one day.
I put a resist pen and some unetched pcb material in my pen plotter, ran the plot a few times also cleaning the pen.
The fat Radio Shack pens worked the best, the ink was thicker.
A bit of touchup and I got nice pcbs after etching.. They were even panelized.
The drilling took more time. They were for a Pay TV descrambler.
That was a really interesting video! I liked that combination of old and new look.
Ah I remember the DIP pads with the tracks in between the pads on sheets...
Wow, I haven't seen those stagger legged rockwell chips since early 80's Gottlieb pinball machines
The good old days. Thanks for sharing this.
That's architectural/engineering tape. I don't remember if Letraset made them, but i remember (when i was a kid) playing with my parent's discards. Making name cartouches with the tape and letters with the Letraset sets.
I used to sell an interrupt driven printer buffer to do the same job.
Oh happy days of building ya own PCB's, I remember them well, happy memories. :)
2000 pounds from 1985 would correspond to roughly 6000 pounds today! Not too shabby for a student!
How did you prototype these things back in the day? Breadboards? Wire-wrap?
Now this brings back memories of early PCB layouts.
Very cool. Thanks for sharing!
My dad designed the multibuffer sold by Ringdale. Same era
When I was at school in Watford, Watford Electronics sold electronic bits out of a semi down Cardiff road.
I remember buying components from the house in Cardiff road, in the mid 70's. My mun still has a clock built from a Practical Electronics magazine which is still going strong since 1975.
Used to spend most Saturdays sitting in their front room while waiting for the pocket money to turn in to components. Last used them when they had the shop in watford high street
Ah the good ol' days. I loved laying out the through hole boards, but I was doing it in the 90's so I was using Protel and everything was a mix of TH and SMT
Very interesting ! I was working for the British Government at the time doing electronic design, and at around the time you designed this board, I was working on a digital voice storage unit.
The main thin I’d like to point out is that while I used DRAM I also used Z80 microcontrollers. They took away they headache of doing a refresh for you. Set them running, and then just access the RAM as you would a static device.
I’d be interested to know if you considered using this processor as we relied on it for many years until Intel brought in the big boys.
You need lots of GPIO to talk to two printer buses, Z80 has none, you need an I/O peripheral for each 8 bits of GPIO IIRC, or to fashion some memory-mapped hardware from scratch. Microcontroller was just the ticket here.
Mark Tillotson The Z80 had two lines coming out of it, MREQ/ and IORQ/. With these two lines the processor could determine to access the DRAM or the I/O. In the case of the engineering problem here there would be an 74244 for the input and a 74374 for the output. The input would be interrupt buffered into DRAM and then pushed out at leisure to the printer (assuming it had ‘data waiting’ line to be used as a second interrupt).
This is not a well thought out proof of concept, just a quick jot down of notes..... now it’s time to get out the breadboard !
The DRAM refresh is nicely done; proper engineering!
I remember this in the shop! It seems they paid you better than they paid their staff!
You remember that item? Wow.
@@NeuronalAxon I worked there for several years then worked nearby for several more years, so was a frequent visitor of WE.
How times have changed. I remember visiting Technomatic to buy a tone generator chip. In someone's house before they grew.
Most of my prototyping boards were all wire wrapped instead of PCBs. Today, its just far quicker to design a PCB and get a prototype PCB back in a week or less. its very difficult & time consuming to home etch your own PCBs with 1000 or more traces which most are between 7 to 20 mils.
Interesting you went home made etched PCB and not wire wrapped for the prototype. I remember using the Bishop Graphics tapes and donut's for creating scaled up layouts and photo-reducing to a negative photo-tool.
Wire-wrap sockets and boards were really expensive back then.
You did well. In '86 I was on £4,500 per year making similar simple test equipment in a factory. Thanks to redundancy I escaped. It frightens me I might still be there.
escaped?
Pretty much what I was on in '86 as well; I couldn't imagine getting almost 6 months wages for designing something like this.
@@優さん-n7m I escaped the closed world of factory life discovering that being a field service engineer provided a car and took me to offices, shops, banks, hotels and a whole world of interesting places to work and people to meet without constant supervision and clocking in and out on a time clock leading to being self employed. Escaped!
You know you have made it as an EE when stuff you have designed as surplus.
I’m at work unable to hear the video, but happy to see the notification popping up.
And that's where the phrase "taping out" comes from in the SOC design sector 👍
aleks trifunovic according to folklore.org, it actually comes from the act of producing a paper tape that would be fed into a photoplotter.
Hi, I did work like that on the job, in blue-red as well as at home in black crêpe tape, in the
'70's/early '80's.
Nowadays I would use a PC and Printer!
Congrats on reaching 100K subscribers
Forgot all about Watford Electronics! Remember buying a fair bit from them in the 90s. Always baffled me why they were called Watford Electronics and based in Luton! Shame it ended with the owners screwing over all their customers really.
Hi there Mike, Yeah i have got a set of electraset type transfers and are still available on ebay complete with ferric chloride "Back in the day" he he
I remember the green Watford Electronics ads in The Micro User magazine!
Me too!
I think you're missing a "c" in the title there ;)
Very cool! Thanks for sharing. Man I smashed my index finger yesterday with a 4lb sledge. Thank god I was wearing gloves. Hope your finger heals quick buddy
Didn't Watford electronics used to sell atari & amiga peripherals in the 90's like hard drives etc? I seem to recall the name from atari user magazine
Thanks for sharing, Mike. Nicely done!
Well cool video buddy! Nice 1 ! 👍
I still have some crepe tape from the mid 70's...
Ditto! And rolls of pads too... I miss those days, when I actually did stuff for fun and to prove myself that I could do it :-)
@@JoseSilveira-newhandleforYT :-) We're getting old...
@@JoseSilveira-newhandleforYT I'm sure I still have somewhere a box full of Bishop tape rolls and Mecanorma transfers.
@@pmcouto Tell me about it :-)
@@pmcouto Probably less sticky than my fingers after having a cinnamon roll :-)
Oh! So that's how the wiggly lines were done!
Gosh I wished I could've afforded a bunch of things from watford electronics :) You must've been over the moon with a £2k cheque!
Especially in the 80s, £2K was a lot of money.
I still have my Dot Matrix Memory Buffer..And that Micro controller CHIP is used in a lot of Pinball Machines ..
Good ol' days! I started making (analog) PCB's even before rub-on symbols and tapes were available. Traces and pads were hand-painted with a black lacquer and a very fine brush, directly onto the copper, and then etched. Way ugly and many thin line interruptions having to be soldered over. Getting traces not to touch other pads was a true challenge. It was sort of like holding a brush in one hand and a scalpel to scratch excess away in the other. And then there was that smell of pressed phenol paper (pertinax, FR-2) when soldering, mmmhhh! Today I design my PCB's on CAD and have them etched in China, how boring life has become...
Ungrateful
Can you share what service you use in China?
@@donmckee90 food
@@donmckee90 I used several manufacturers already. I had very good experiences with each of them. Just search aliexpress.com for "PCB service" or " PCB prototypes" or similar. Be informed that most of the manufacturers require Gerber files. Modern CAD systems export these directly or you can use an online Gerber converter for your file format.
Oh man! That brings back memories of my first board - in 1986 for a company called Video Vector Dynamics.
What did it do?
@@NeuronalAxon It switched off a PC (Columbia data products!), using a relay when a byte was sent from the RS232 port.
@@Spiderelectron - lol, cool - do you remember what the greater purpose of the whole system was?
@@NeuronalAxon Yeah, it batch-processed images scanned from old fashioned tachograph discs, it ran over night and switched itself off when finished! It vreated reports on driver hours, rest periods, speeding etc.
@@Spiderelectron - lol, that's historical. Did they want to save electricity by powering the PC down?
Now it is so easy.
Layout the board in a couple of hours, then get prototype boards in a week or so for $25.
It is not worth the time to to use a proto board.
SMD is no problem.
You also have the design in cad ready for productiion.
How did you get the contract? Did you read an announcement and thought a printer buffer is something you could built? I am student right now, so I am quite interested in the process and making some money myself ;)
Agreed, surely it wasn't a "hello chaps, sorry bit of a cold call i know, need anything designing?"
Oh these old tapes... it was worst if a complete section had to move in case of more signals or circuits needed. I've done a lot of 6809 and 68k pcbs (music synthesisers ) in this technic. Thank silicicon for cad systems. Nice to see a lot of people started in a similar way. Sometimes I forget my roots...
What kind of synths?
@@NeuronalAxon Keyboards and sound editing systems. PPG in Hamburg/Germany. The company closed end of '87. PPG Wave 2.3 was the name of our last for a few years. In the last year we started with cad on a Unix system, but ist wasn't a real PCB cad based on netlists. It was more like pain in the a... Nowadays it's so easy
@@reinermunch5159 - Oh wow - PPG are amongst my favourite synths - I want a Waveterm system so badly! ;)
It must've been interesting working for Wolfgang Palm?
@@NeuronalAxon Yes it was. I've learned a lot from Wolfgang. He could read a 6809 hex like a assembler code, including the conditional branches.
Sometimes Wavesystems are on a marketplace here... but expensive.
Wolfgang is still active and do impressive synth software for personal computers.
I'm doing hard and firmware for medical devices today... since 30 years
@@reinermunch5159 - Thanks! What a fascinating career you've had. :)
Ah! Lovely. 6800 man, myself. Nostalgia clearly isn't what it used to be.
Hi Mike I live near Sheffield and I was wondering if you have or know where I can get a large ferrite transformer or even just the core for a project Im building large as in 1200v 400A igbt module Half bridge 3300uf 450v caps etc