How we did electronics in the 1980s...

[Zad]

I'm about Dave's age and, like many of us here, got into electronics pretty early on in life. In the 1980s that meant no Internet, PDFs of data sheets and app notes, and certainly no CAD software. For the most part though, design tools consisted of a pencil and paper, then a Dalo pen and copper clad. Designing this way made you think about placement, routing, current paths and all the rest. Somehow it pulled you closer to the physical electronics than CAD work does.

Anyway, rummaging around in my parents' attic earlier today, I unearthed a sketch book of mine from 1982-1984 or so. I bring you....

ZadCAD!



Even now, not many 13 year olds design PCBs. Back then it was almost unheard of. Yes, its terrible, but that's how you learn!

[mazurov]

I was doing it on charting paper. You draw the layout, then affix it to a piece of copper laminate, drill holes, deburr, then draw the traces with nail polish thinned with acetone and using drilled holes as guides. The drawing won't survive, unfortunately.

[22swg]

Wonderful ... I used the fanfold 'music' paper . offices dumped it like it was scrap ! I was a bit older than 13... 

[mikerj]

I had a book with all my projects in it, hand drawn schematics, veroboard layouts, and PCBs.  Not seen it for many, many years though, probably got binned long ago.

I had my own (unofficial) business when I was 15, repairing car audio components (head units, amps, sometimes car alarms etc) for a local installers that my father worked for at the time.

[SeanB]

I must have been around 16 when I started etching my own boards. Pens, letraset, crepe tape and such, along with either the yellow or brown ferric chloride as etchant, and using SK10 to protect the finished boards.

Could never get the UV to work, probably the sheets or the spray was too old, or I was not doing it right. No SMD parts, no double sided and some still works.

[timb]

I was 11 or so when I etched my first board. Bought a kit from RatShack with a copper clad board, the brown ferric acid and some of those "stick on" traces and pads, though I could never get them to stay on so I used a Sharpie and hand-drew everything.

I used it to make the board for my lab power supply (which was based off a book I got from RatShack as well).

This must have been 1994 or '95.

Good times. Good times.


Sent from my Smartphone

[coppice]

I'm about Dave's age and, like many of us here, got into electronics pretty early on in life. In the 1980s that meant no Internet,

Well most of us didn't have direct access to the internet unless we were in a college, but that's broadly true.

PDFs of data sheets and app notes,

True

and certainly no CAD software.

Are you sure you don't mean the 1880s? Most of the CAD software we use for boards today existed in the early 80s, and older programs existed before that. We used to use 4k resolution screens,  too. We're only just getting back to that.

[vk6zgo]

I'm about Dave's age and, like many of us here, got into electronics pretty early on in life. In the 1980s that meant no Internet,

Well most of us didn't have direct access to the internet unless we were in a college, but that's broadly true.

PDFs of data sheets and app notes,

True

and certainly no CAD software.

Are you sure you don't mean the 1880s? Most of the CAD software we use for boards today existed in the early 80s, and older programs existed before that. We used to use 4k resolution screens,  too. We're only just getting back to that.

Poor people didn't have access to stuff like that!

In the late '80s my employer used a pen plotter to draw PCB layouts,but all the earlier stuff was done by hand.
The "in-house" PCBs were better than those in some of the commercial equipment we had.

[rsjsouza]

I was doing it on charting paper. You draw the layout, then affix it to a piece of copper laminate, drill holes, deburr, then draw the traces with nail polish thinned with acetone and using drilled holes as guides. The drawing won't survive, unfortunately.

Apart from the nail polish ink (I used rear-projection pens), the rest was what I used to make my own PCBs - including the charting paper. To make holes I used to use something similar to this: a stapler that did a clean job but had a tendency to "swell" the hole a bit by pushing the copper aside.

I learned all this from my dad at the early age of 8.

Most of the CAD software we use for boards today existed in the early 80s,

Well, perhaps larger corporations already used Intergraph or IBM systems (I recall seeing Sisgraph CAE/CAD/CAM stations at a tradeshow in 1984), but most of the then-turned mainstream EDA companies (OrCAD, Mentor, Cadence) appeared in the early 80's and their prices surely not targeted the hobbyist.

[coppice]

quote author=coppice link=topic=38034.msg536093#msg536093 date=1414116576]
Most of the CAD software we use for boards today existed in the early 80s,

Well, perhaps larger corporations already used Intergraph or IBM systems (I recall seeing Sisgraph CAE/CAD/CAM stations at a tradeshow in 1984), but most of the then-turned mainstream EDA companies (OrCAD, Mentor, Cadence) appeared in the early 80's and their prices surely not targeted the hobbyist.
[/quote]
Mentor and Cadence were only available on expensive workstations and were expensive packages. However, OrCAD ran on pretty much any IBM PC with a graphics card. Both the hardware and software were affordable for enthusiastic hobbyists. The biggest problems then were getting getting reasonably priced access to Gerber plotting and PCB fabrication.

[EEVblog]

I'm about Dave's age and, like many of us here, got into electronics pretty early on in life. In the 1980s that meant no Internet, PDFs of data sheets and app notes, and certainly no CAD software.

It also meant no credit card ordering, and the Digikey's and Mouser's we now take for granted were quite limited or non-existant, at least here in Australia.
Also, there was no such thing as cheap professional PCB's we now take for granted. You could get either cheap (tin plate, no solder mask or silkscreen, plated if you spend more) or professional, but not both.

[EEVblog]

Well most of us didn't have direct access to the internet unless we were in a college, but that's broadly true.

What he means is the WWW as we know it now, and search engines, e-commerce, images and PDF's, and basically the entire worlds knowledge online.

Are you sure you don't mean the 1880s? Most of the CAD software we use for boards today existed in the early 80s, and older programs existed before that. We used to use 4k resolution screens,  too. We're only just getting back to that.

Altium started in mid 80's as Protel AutoTrax.
I started with a shareware program called PCBreeze from Kepic in Australia (it was the authors name IIRC) in the mid-late 80's.
Wow, you can still download it from an old shareware archive:
http://aet.calu.edu/ftp/eet/sharware/disk7/

[coppice]

Well most of us didn't have direct access to the internet unless we were in a college, but that's broadly true.

What he means is the WWW as we know it now, and search engines, e-commerce, images and PDF's, and basically the entire worlds knowledge online.

There was a thriving internet before the WWW. E-mail, FTP archives, and various forms of search existed. HTTP and HTML just moved everything up a notch (quite a big notch). Direct access to the internet is what most of us lacked. If you worked in a progressive place that actually gave you access there was a huge wealth of material on the early internet, and surprisingly little of it was porn.

[IanB]

There was a thriving internet before the WWW. E-mail, FTP archives, and various forms of search existed.

I was learning electronics in the mid-70's as a teenager. There was certainly no Internet then, certainly not if you were doing electronics at home as a hobby. You had magazines with projects in them to build, and teaching or editorial articles, and pages of mail order adverts to buy components from. In the mid-70's home computers were beyond the reach of any child or student budget and modems were not really found in homes.

Yes, to make circuits you could either use Veroboard, or you could draw your PCBs on single sided copper clad board with an etch resist pen, etch it at home, and drill the holes for the component leads. If you were building magazine projects you could use their printed PCB layouts as a guide, or you could order the PCB ready made to go along with the project.

It was actually much more satisfying to make circuit boards by hand with an etch resist pen than it is today. Computers and automation take the fun out of things.

[IanB]

I'm about Dave's age...

Dave's a youngster! His kid hasn't even started school, let alone grown up and left home, which means Dave is nowhere near being a grandparent yet. If you're Dave's age you're a mere whippersnapper.

[EEVblog]

There was a thriving internet before the WWW. E-mail, FTP archives, and various forms of search existed. HTTP and HTML just moved everything up a notch (quite a big notch). Direct access to the internet is what most of us lacked. If you worked in a progressive place that actually gave you access there was a huge wealth of material on the early internet, and surprisingly little of it was porn.

Yes, but how much was there that pertained to electronics design and engineering? Not even 0.01% of what existed by the year 2000, I'd be pretty sure, let alone today, enoguh to say it was virtually non-existent.
Digital cameras didn't even exist, heck, the GIF format wasn't invented until 1987 and JPEG didn't come until the 90's. So exchange of say of say schematics was very limited back then.

[EEVblog]

Dave is nowhere near being a grandparent yet.

BUT I was asked if I was Sagan's grandfather the other day by a counter person at the post office! 

[coppice]

There was a thriving internet before the WWW. E-mail, FTP archives, and various forms of search existed. HTTP and HTML just moved everything up a notch (quite a big notch). Direct access to the internet is what most of us lacked. If you worked in a progressive place that actually gave you access there was a huge wealth of material on the early internet, and surprisingly little of it was porn.

Yes, but how much was there that pertained to electronics design and engineering? Not even 0.01% of what existed by the year 2000, I'd be pretty sure, let alone today, enoguh to say it was virtually non-existent.
Digital cameras didn't even exist, heck, the GIF format wasn't invented until 1987 and JPEG didn't come until the 90's. So exchange of say of say schematics was very limited back then.

Huh? In the early days of the internet almost everything on it pertained to science and engineering. GIF was a fairly late entrant. The problem before GIF was not there were no graphics file formats, but that there were too many. Every time you found something you had to hunt around for an image converter program to get it into a form you could view with the tools you used.

[vk6zgo]

I'm about Dave's age and, like many of us here, got into electronics pretty early on in life. In the 1980s that meant no Internet, PDFs of data sheets and app notes, and certainly no CAD software.

It also meant no credit card ordering, and the Digikey's and Mouser's we now take for granted were quite limited or non-existant, at least here in Australia.
Also, there was no such thing as cheap professional PCB's we now take for granted. You could get either cheap (tin plate, no solder mask or silkscreen, plated if you spend more) or professional, but not both.

Interestingly,Mouser has been around since at least the early 1970s,maybe earlier,as a Mail Order supplier.
Mail Order was huge in the USA,& some of the businesses from that area took to the Internet like ducks to water!

[coppice]

Interestingly,Mouser has been around since at least the early 1970s,maybe earlier,as a Mail Order supplier.
Mail Order was huge in the USA,& some of the businesses from that area took to the Internet like ducks to water!

As an early 70s student in the UK we used to mail order stuff from US suppliers with a postal order (remember those?) for payment, and got the goods in a very short time. The UK suppliers wouldn't deal with us unless we had a registered company.

[22swg]

I got my RCA 1802  mpu from USA , I had to go to the Bank of America and buy a money order in $ ,  when it arrived I treated the chip with great respect ! . 1970s best component shop in UK was radio shack ( now gone) then we had Maplin , but they seem to have kicked components into touch . my first kit was a valve hi-fi amp from Heath kit...  electronics hobby was quite expensive back then .

1970 £5  now  2014 ~ £60 !

[wiss]

I got my RCA 1802  mpu from USA , I had to go to the Bank of America and buy a money order in $ ,  when it arrived I treated the chip with great respect ! . 1970s best component shop in UK was radio shack ( now gone) then we had Maplin , but they seem to have kicked components into touch . my first kit was a valve hi-fi amp from Heath kit...  electronics hobby was quite expensive back then .

A magazine-kiosk in my home town had Elektor (about -88), remember being so jealous of all the cheap components the Brits so easily had access to!

[Simon]

we used to mail order stuff from US suppliers with a postal order (remember those?) for payment, and got the goods in a very short time.

I actually had someone ask if i would accept one for an ebay order..... I did of course but man yea, long winded by today's standards

[rsjsouza]

Well, perhaps larger corporations already used Intergraph or IBM systems (I recall seeing Sisgraph CAE/CAD/CAM stations at a tradeshow in 1984), but most of the then-turned mainstream EDA companies (OrCAD, Mentor, Cadence) appeared in the early 80's and their prices surely not targeted the hobbyist.

Mentor and Cadence were only available on expensive workstations and were expensive packages. However, OrCAD ran on pretty much any IBM PC with a graphics card. Both the hardware and software were affordable for enthusiastic hobbyists. The biggest problems then were getting getting reasonably priced access to Gerber plotting and PCB fabrication.

If Wikipedia is anywhere near reliable, it says there that Mentor started in 1981, OrCAD in 1985 and Cadence in 1988. Even still, no parent of a kid toying with electronics in the 80's would be sane enough to give him an expensive IBM PC - Sinclairs, Commodores, MSXs would be the most probable choices.

Specifically to my experience in my home country (Brazil), the IBM PC was something unattainable for most non-corporations during early 80's. Only when the government reduced import taxes in '89 is where the "invasion" of imported goods started at full force, with the obvious reduction in prices. By this time my dad bought us a 10MHz NEC V-20 PC-XT with two 5-1/4' FDDs, one ST238R (30MB) HDD and a CGA graphics adapter tied to a green phosphorous monitor, which was barely enough for CAD. I was only able to get a copy of both AutoCAD 2.6 and OrCAD '87 in early 1990s when we already had a Trident 512KB SVGA board (1024x768 interlaced) tied to a NEC Multisync 3D.

Mail Order was huge in the USA,& some of the businesses from that area took to the Internet like ducks to water!

I remember drooling over the Radio Shack catalogs brought to us by friends... I was very jealous of US prices, selection and the mail order system...

BUT I was asked if I was Sagan's grandfather the other day by a counter person at the post office! 

Yeah, just like me, you had your son at a later age (closer to 40 than to 20). Nobody still called me a grandpa yet, but I know it will be a matter of time (grey hair does not help  ).

[Yago]

No tiewraps, all clove hitch knot!

[Wilksey]

Maplins certainly have changed in the last few years!  They have become more generic rather than selling components, they are OK if you want a semi cheap disco light for your living room.....

We never had a RS, we had Tandy where I live, I used to live in that place!

I remember the old mail order and BBS, and the phone bills of dial up internet, and you waited with baited breath as your parents opened the BT bill... (Of course, dial up become financially available to general public in the UK in the mid - late 90's if I remember, anyone remember Freeserve? The best thing since AOL and Netscape free trials!)

[coppice]

If Wikipedia is anywhere near reliable, it says there that Mentor started in 1981, OrCAD in 1985 and Cadence in 1988. Even still, no parent of a kid toying with electronics in the 80's would be sane enough to give him an expensive IBM PC - Sinclairs, Commodores, MSXs would be the most probable choices.

Wikipedia might be reliable, but you have to actually read it. Cadence was a new name in 1988 for the merger of two older companies, each of which was several years older.

OrCAD wasn't the first PC CAD software, although it was the first to really take off. OrCAD schematic files became the input format for a lot of tools almost overnight. Schematic software became available remarkably quickly after the IBM PC was launched, although PCB software took a little longer.

Kids might not have had many IBM PCs in the early 80s, but adults certainly did. The PC was initially a consumer and one man business machine. Larger businesses were highly suspicious of these things.

[Simon]

Maplins certainly have changed in the last few years!  They have become more generic rather than selling components, they are OK if you want a semi cheap disco light for your living room.....

semi cheap ? hm, my definition of maplin is that it makes some ebay sellers from china with dodgy goods look like jesus christs own table top sale, I bought a digital caliper in there that worked sporadically and by the time i tried to return it first to where I bought it (where conveniently it started to work again) and then by post i spent almost as much as the thing cost me.

If i ever enter a maplins I assume "the pose" look straight ahead dodge any of their pathetic sales assistants that "think" they can help you and arms ready to metaphorically brush them aside as they know nothing of what I'm looking for but think they know all about that DVD player they think they can sell me or whatever other very general consumer goods that I can buy anywhere and would never buy from that dump given my previous experience of a company that sell shit and does not care.

[jancumps]

Well most of us didn't have direct access to the internet unless we were in a college, but that's broadly true.

What he means is the WWW as we know it now, and search engines, e-commerce, images and PDF's, and basically the entire worlds knowledge online.

Are you sure you don't mean the 1880s? Most of the CAD software we use for boards today existed in the early 80s, and older programs existed before that. We used to use 4k resolution screens,  too. We're only just getting back to that.

Altium started in mid 80's as Protel AutoTrax.
I started with a shareware program called PCBreeze from Kepic in Australia (it was the authors name IIRC) in the mid-late 80's.
Wow, you can still download it from an old shareware archive:
http://aet.calu.edu/ftp/eet/sharware/disk7/

Ok, couldn' resist... Installed a dos emulator and downloaded pcbreeze

Here is my first layout. Don't spare your critique.

[jancumps]

And here's one of the demo boards that came with PCBreeze:

[nfmax]

For hobby stuff, I used the original Easy-PC for DOS, with the original 'booby trap' menu system. It was actually pretty good for simple boards. I still have it somewhere, I wonder if it still works? At work we used Redcap for schematic capture (on the first IBM XT I ever saw in captivity) and then Redboard when it became available. They turned into Cadstar which Racal sold on to Zuken. Interesting both packages are still around!

Max

[G0HZU]

EasyPC PCB design software (from NumberOne in the UK) was released in the mid/late 80s and 'Circuitbusters' released Star and Superstar(pro) in the 1980s.
This was a really useful RF design/synthesis package. Circuitbusters then became Eagleware a few years later. HP also released AppCAD and Numberone also had programs like Analyser and Analyser 2 back around those days.

These were the first proper CAD tools I ever used about 25yrs ago. I still have copies of all this SW from 25yrs ago but I'm not sure if any of it will run on a modern PC.

All the above SW started out really cheap to buy. I think EasyPC was £49 in the UK and the Circuitbusters SW started out at about $99 in the USA. So this stuff was easily within reach of the hobbyist and small business owner

[Radio Tech]

Some of you guys make me feel old. What is this PCB stuff you speak of?     
When I started at the age of 11 or 12 we used no circuit boards. Everything I build was terminal strips and point to point wiring. And at that time there were plenty of local part houses including my favorite Radio Shack.  Guess you can say I started "dumpster diving" in the early 70's. There were so many TV shops back then and used parts were plentiful.

Somewhere around here I have hand drawings of old tube projects that were very crude...   

[fcb]

I still use Easy-PC (v18 now), and have had a full license since DOS days and update it annually.

www.numberone.com

[cosmos]

I found a box of these in the basement

[m100]

First designs I built back in the 70's were with a ratsnest, on a veroboard or hand drawn with etch resist pen pcbs.   The only ready made PCB's were in a few kits I built (Maplin or Tandy maybe?)

By the early to mid 80's I was working in a large utility company doing low volume analogue and 6800 micro designs for use within the company.  Initially tape on film and then using (an unknown make) of PCB CAD on a BBC Model B, dot matrix printed on fanfold paper, copied to presentation acetates with office photocopier.  UV exposed and etched in bubble tank.  We later added an immersion tin tank.  Did plenty of double sided 'Eurocard' 160 x100mm boards but none of them had through hole plating, all top to bottom connections were achieved using soldered vias made with bits of cut off resistor leads (no soldering of the top side of components was a strictly adhered design rule)  Even did gold plating of PCB edge connectors in the lab. 

Moved to something on a PC in the late 1980's, can't recall the name of that software either! but still had no autorouting.  A clampdown on chemicals in the workplace restricted the 'official' use of our etching facilities in about 1990, at around the time self designs were also beginning to be frowned upon.  My first self designed but outsourced for manufacture PCB was in about 1991/2, single sided but the first one I ever did with a solder mask.  It even came back from the manufacturers with roller plating and at a price so cheap it wasn't even worth etching anything other than one offs any more.

[Refrigerator]

I've always wanted to play with electronics, made my first circuit when i was 5 years old, it was a little 12V lamp hooked up through a pot to a 9V battery all in a cardboard box, i also connected a small broken piece of some radio pcb that had a 3,5mm jack in it, i thought that if i plugged some headphones in that jack i would hear radio... silly me.

[22swg]

Where did all you EEs get your PCs ! ... in the 70s really a lot of ££££ $$$$ , I had to DIY a 286 machine , repair a monitor, borrow a copy of DOS 3.1 . Only software I bought was Turbo Basic.  Now my 4 year old grandson has an i-thing, pretends he is a shark and kills swimmers ......   

[mikerj]

Where did all you EEs get your PCs ! ... in the 70s really a lot of ££££ $$$$ , I had to DIY a 286 machine , repair a monitor, borrow a copy of DOS 3.1 . Only software I bought was Turbo Basic.  Now my 4 year old grandson has an i-thing, pretends he is a shark and kills swimmers ......

I DIY'd a 286 from parts bought at a local computer auction which were very popular at the time.  Since I was at school and lacking in funds, I bought a dead 286 motherboard for a few GBP's with a vague hope of repairing it.  After many hours trying to find out why it wouldn't boot I decided to try swapping the two BIOS EPROMs over (two 8 bit 27xx devices) and it all sprung into life, booting DOS from a floppy drive until I could afford a second hand 20MB MFM drive and interface.

[Tandy]

The only ready made PCB's were in a few kits I built (Maplin or Tandy maybe?)

They were probably from Maplin as back then they had their own magazine called 'Electronics the Maplin Magazine' where they had new projects each month that they sold as kits. Tandy had a small number of kits up to about the mid 80's when the kits were replaced with Science Lab X-in-1 experimenter labs with the spring terminals.

Page from the 1980 catalogue showing kits.

[free_electron]

SmartWORK ! drool .... that was the bees knees ! it would even shave dip pads to run traces between them. something today's software cant even do !

Late 70's : i made single sided pcb's . draw on 5mm ruled paper. wrap board in paper. use an awl to punch center marks for holes. use a Decon-dalo ink pen to draw pattern and etch in sodium persulfate ( i never used that icky brown crap )
Early 80's i went photo way. i would print on 24 needle printer from smartwork , transfer to Litex film ( essentially x-ray film from Agfa ) and then expose PCB. in 1988 i went to Nokia in finland during summer holidays ( i won a inter-school competition that earned me a 2 month internship at Noka in Finland ) and discovered SMD ! and then my world changed. I also discovered Autotrax then ( and a layout program from Teradyne called Vanguard)

so yeah. how we did electronics in the 80's ? in my time i used photo boards and SMD 

[jancumps]

I found a box of these in the basement

I'll see your Elektor and raise you my Elektuur

[rsjsouza]

Cadence was a new name in 1988 for the merger of two older companies, each of which was several years older.

And yet still a CAD system unattainable for the hobbyist in the 80's, irrespective of its name...

Kids might not have had many IBM PCs in the early 80s (...)

As the original poster mentioned, "got into electronics pretty early on in life. In the 1980s that meant no (...) CAD software.". The vast majority of hobbyists in the 80's did not have access to CAD software - apart perhaps from free_electron

I'll see your Elektor and raise you my Elektuur

I actually remember this cover! My dad had the British version of it.

[PA0PBZ]

SmartWORK ! drool .... that was the bees knees ! it would even shave dip pads to run traces between them. something today's software cant even do !

SmartWork FTW!

[SeanB]

The only ready made PCB's were in a few kits I built (Maplin or Tandy maybe?)

They were probably from Maplin as back then they had their own magazine called 'Electronics the Maplin Magazine' where they had new projects each month that they sold as kits. Tandy had a small number of kits up to about the mid 80's when the kits were replaced with Science Lab X-in-1 experimenter labs with the spring terminals.

Page from the 1980 catalogue showing kits.

I have one of those spring reverb lines by me, never knew it was a Maplin supplied part. A little crusty and the rubbers are well past their best before date.

[cosmos]

I found a box of these in the basement

I'll see your Elektor and raise you my Elektuur

how about this one?
with my home made pcb of the coverpage design below, populated 100% with scavenged parts from boards found in the skip of a local electronics factory.
artwork seems to have been photocopied to multiple layers of transparencies and exposed in the sun.
etching was with ferrocloride (can still remembermost of my clothes had stains and holes, holes mostly from spilled battery acid)

[RobertoLG]

Some oldies

[jancumps]

Some oldies

I'll see your oldies and raise you this oldie:



1969

[atferrari]

Some oldies

Eu compre as duas no Brasil! Meu irmao! Uma delas esta aquí conmigo.

Got them in Brazil from the stand.

[atferrari]

My very first PCB was drawn with a toothpick and nail polish. It worked! (The PCB came out OK from the FeCl bath). The electronic side of it? It did not worked at all.

Still a stumbling block for me!

[Zad]

In 1983 virtually nobody here in the UK had workstation level personal computers, and even fewer 13 year olds. Certainly around here nobody had the sort of income to buy a printer, most of us were drooling at the new ZX Spectrum! I think our brethren over in the US don't quite appreciate how tight money was for most people over this side of the Atlantic back then. Nail varnish worked fine for my early needs, and then a fancy Dalo etch resist pen and rub-down transfers.

I was lucky, my dad was a TV repair man (working for one of the few enlightened companies who regularly ran their own night school training sessions and gave their people a thorough grounding in engineering theory as well as operation and repair) so I used to get scrap boards from all sorts of electronic goods. It also meant I could order from Radio Spares (RS Components) and Farnell, who are based just down the road from me in Leeds. Also in Leeds at the time was M&B radio, who had a shop in the railway arches next to Leeds station. A classic electronics shop, with bins full of components, stacks of populated PCBs from ex military equipment and racks piled high with "boat anchor" test gear. Electronics heaven if you are 13, or 113 really. Sadly long gone. Anyway, I got my copper clad from there - none of this fancy photo resist.

Even as recently as 1992 when I was a postgrad student studying Radio Comms, you had to ask really nicely to get access to the Internet. Undergrads didn't even get a whiff of it. So yes, I was on the Internet before the Mosaic browser existed thankyouverymuch (I was on the amateur radio AX25 BBSs long before that). Talking of which, this was in one of my 5.25in storage boxes:



I suspect I got that for my first PC, a cannibalised Amstrad PC1640 (8086) motherboard and other stuff bought cheap from an amateur radio show.

[IanB]

In 1983 virtually nobody here in the UK had workstation level personal computers, and even fewer 13 year olds. Certainly around here nobody had the sort of income to buy a printer, most of us were drooling at the new ZX Spectrum!

In 1983 I was drooling over the BBC Model B. But alas, I could only dream...

[rmacintosh]

my grey beard isnt long enough for this thread,
but I still use my dads old VOM meter from back in the early 80's.

 

[RobertoLG]

Talking about old gear LOL!

LABO RF generator  Mod F6

Sorry for the bad picture, here are some beter ones, "not mine"  http://produto.mercadolivre.com.br/MLB-594260563-gerador-de-rf-modelo-f6-marca-labo-aceita-lance-_JM

[RobertoLG]

Some oldies

I'll see your oldies and raise you this oldie:



1969

Hehe, in october of this year I came to this world

[RobertoLG]

Some oldies

Eu compre as duas no Brasil! Meu irmao! Uma delas esta aquí conmigo.

Got them in Brazil from the stand.

I got some others too, but they are brazilian magazines 

[bills]

Realy ? 1980's I started in the 1960's we had to use books and magazines I would have given my eye teeth to have a 2n107 or a ck . PCB what were those? "btw I know"
my components were scavenged from old TV's and radios, had some cool WW2 surplus stuff good parts source.
fast forward to the 80's Loved wire wrap proto typing, fast forward to now 38 days from retirement my PLC's are now out of date back to the old radios. my  oldest set was homebrewed in 1919. My oldest TV is from 1952 the year I was born. and yes they all work.     

[miguelvp]

Before WWW there was Usenet, and it was pretty computer and electronics oriented.

I even have a book on how to send e-mail from one network to another, because you had to specify gateways depending what network it was destined for. I have the book at work but I'll check if mouser had a domain back then.

Oh the days when you didn't have to compress anything to send it via the internet.

Edit: of course big data then was in the Megabyte range.

[Bud]

Back then I did not have access to FeCl etchant and my friend who worked at a medical supply house gave me a bottle of nitric acid. Worked as a charm but I had  to be quick because it ate copper like crazy.

[miguelvp]

Back then you could go the the Chemist store and purchase all kinds of chemicals in Spain. So you want sulfur, charcoal and potassium nitrate? no problem, I made such a purchase on my early teens and the chemist didn't even flinched, but he knew me and my family and that I liked to experiment with things

Edit: Then again for electronics it wasn't that great, I fried the Z-80 on my ZX-81 because I shorted the edge expansion card plugin some circuit I did, I ordered it from the electronic store and it took 2 months for it to arrive.

[coppice]

Some of you guys make me feel old. What is this PCB stuff you speak of?     
When I started at the age of 11 or 12 we used no circuit boards. Everything I build was terminal strips and point to point wiring. And at that time there were plenty of local part houses including my favorite Radio Shack.  Guess you can say I started "dumpster diving" in the early 70's. There were so many TV shops back then and used parts were plentiful.

Somewhere around here I have hand drawings of old tube projects that were very crude...   

I started in the late 60s, and I started with PCBs. I also started with valves/tubes. It worries me now when I think of my father letting a 12 year old design and build things with 500V or more on them. He was an electrical engineer, and actually taught me electrical safety. He just trusted me.

[coppice]

Before WWW there was Usenet, and it was pretty computer and electronics oriented.

Usenet and thousands of bulletin boards (BBSs), many of which were electronics focused. There used to be mountains of material on those sites. A 10MB hard drive can hold a surprising amount of good material when its pure test, and simple graphics images.

Schematics distributed as graphics files were a big thing well before most amateurs had CAD software.

[coppice]

Back then you could go the the Chemist store and purchase all kinds of chemicals in Spain. So you want sulfur, charcoal and potassium nitrate? no problem.

I bet playing with those was a blast. 

The local pharmacies in the UK in the 60s and 70s stocked quite a few rather oddball things, which didn't appear to have medical use. FeCl could always be bought there. Perhaps they catered for the medical electronics market. 

[miguelvp]

Farmers, plumbers, dentists, doctors, school teachers etc.. a lot of professions needed chemicals, as well as households will need chemicals for whatever reason.

[coppice]

Farmers, plumbers, dentists, doctors, school teachers etc.. a lot of professions needed chemicals, as well as households will need chemicals for whatever reason.

2 of the 5 jobs you listed are medical, so they are naturally catered for by a pharamcy, but by stuff labelled pharmaceutical grade. Not by scruffy bags simply labelled "Ferric Chloride". School teachers got their supplies from specialist companies serving the lab market. Plumbers got their supplies from the numerous plumber supply shops. We didn't see too many farmers in 1960s suburban London.

If local professionals needed chemical supplies from the local pharmacy in the 60s they would still need them today. Try going in your local Boots the Chemist in North London now and see if you can buy FeCl.

[miguelvp]

It´s been a while so my memory fails me a bit. There were different stores that sold chemical products and anyone could go and buy them. I bet some where old school pharmacies, then there where farmer oriented shops that would sell chemicals as well, there where also industrial shops. Anyways it was all pretty much unregulated back then.

[Tac Eht Xilef]

The local pharmacies in the UK in the 60s and 70s stocked quite a few rather oddball things, which didn't appear to have medical use. FeCl could always be bought there. Perhaps they catered for the medical electronics market. 

Back in the day it was used as a styptic. Drop a few grains on some damp cotton wadding, dab it on a cut or graze, and the blood just magically stops!

My grandfather (who was an old bushie, timbercutter, and fencing contractor) used to swear by the stuff for shaving cuts and drawing out splinters.

[Bored@Work]

bulletin boards (BBSs),

Illegal then in many countries, at least in Europe. And that made the equipment to run a BBS or to access one rather expensive. I remember the times well. Many European countries had monopoly government agencies, for running postal, telegraph and telephone service, aka the PTTs.

Using the sacred telephone network for data transfer? This scared the shit out of the bureaucrats at the PTTs. The network was for telephony, dammit. And you were asked to only make phone calls for serious things, and keep the calls short. Date transfer? Run for the hills!

Modems, even the acoustic couplers, need to be certified by the PTTs. It was impossible for an individual to buy a legal modem. Even companies couldn't buy a modem. Modems had to be rented from the PTTs, and as a company you could only rent one if you had a legitimate reason. I.e. if they had vetted you that you had a real, extremely important reason. You were also required to put the uplink side (the board) on a separate telephone line, and the PTTs claimed they connected such line in the CO in a way it would not interfere with phone service. At times when it was still hard for a normal household to get a normal telephone line, and some households had to share a line, it was impossible to get a special, second dedicated line for a BBS.

At one point certified acoustic couplers appeared, which an individual could indeed buy. For what amounted to the equivalent of something like $1000 then. You can't run a serious BBS with an acoustic coupler. And it is a PITA to use one even if you are just a BBS user.

If you wanted to run a BBS you had to illegally import, or illegally buy, and illegally posses, illegally connect, and illegally operate a non-certified modem. All acts were individually punishable. Already importing a non-certified modem or just having one was an offense. So was trading them. And don't ask about the cost for such illegal modems. And if you were serious about running the BBS 24/7 you had to obtain a normal second telephone line under some pretense and illegally repurpose it for data transfer. We where lightyears away from the friendly neighborhood BBS' I have been told existed in the US.

Running a BBS was often more about the act of running one at all, not about providing particular material to the public.

A bit later certified modems appeared which were almost affordable. The big problem was speed. 300 Baud was the standard. 600 Baud was fast. 1200 Baud was super-high end, and extremely expensive. I am not sure if it 1200 Baud or already 2400 Baud was the highest speed that qualified for certification. So back to illegal modems.

At the beginning of the 90th illegal modems were a mass phenomena and started to become cheap. BBS operators and then also BBS users were typically using illegal modems. Authorities hardly cared any more. Although the last raid of BBS systems for illegal modems I know of was around 1992 or 1993.

Then the market was swamped with legal, certified and rather cheap modems. Most of them even worked . ISPs serving individuals started to appear in the second half of the 90th, and these cheap modems were used in the early days of the Internet by individuals to hop onto the Information Superhighway Dirt Track. Which meant, whatever BBS were dying. Some continued on the Internet, some even morphed into an ISP, but it was basically over.

[SeanB]

You were lucky. In the 1980's the only places here that had computers were the banks ( IBM mainframes and dedicated banking terminals in the branches, and with a printer that was either a Diablo or a specialised one to print in the account books), in the university ( HP mainframe, complete with robed attendants), and a few large businesses where a computer was used to do some specialised functions like accounting, data processing or such. Personal computers were mosly the very expensive ZX ones, and some schools had Apple ]['s in a room.

By 1990 you had companies offering PC clones and networking to business for accounts, inventory and such, all with a service contract and yearly fees that included then an annual service ( dedust and check it works well) and support by a trained technician.

Internet was something that was offered via a gateway on the Prestel clone operated by the national TELCO, and was just a page where you got a UNIX shell to use. Modems were 300 baud, 1200/75 or later 2400baud. Then came the first 19200 baud units ( what speed) and they pretty much stayed that way till you had 56k modems, which are still common as ADSL is not going to ever work on some of the old long copper lines. You still buy them new here.

[miguelvp]

Sure they had CPM/80 systems somewhere, it wasn't all system 36 for small to medium companies.

For personal computers the OS-9 based systems came around the same time as the ZX Spectrum as I recall, like the Dragon and other compatible systems.

[Towger]

bulletin boards (BBSs),

Illegal then in many countries, at least in Europe.

Maybe behind the Iron Curtain...

[timb]

I found a box of these in the basement

I'll see your Elektor and raise you my Elektuur

If either one of you (or anyone) has a good scanner, can you please get me a TIFF file at the highest scan resolution you can (1200 to 2400DPI or better would be awesome). I want to clean it up and make some wall paper! *Drool*


Sent from my Smartphone

[miguelvp]

bulletin boards (BBSs),

Illegal then in many countries, at least in Europe.

Maybe behind the Iron Curtain...

The BBSs where not illegal, the non certified modems where illegal. Spain had the same regulations where it was illegal to even plug in a non Telefónica phone. Only approved equipment was allowed to be plugged in. Not that they would know what you had in your home, so even if illegal it was hardly enforced.

Packet radio was all the rage because of the lack of internet and the lack of modems and the official approved ones that you could buy were a piece of crap.

Also getting a new phone line would take months, as in around 3 to 6 months. I do not miss that time period at all. We have more accessible everything now, and better electronics for hobbyists. I hear a lot about how good the good old times were, but they were not, they actually sucked compared to now.

[Towger]

The BBSs where not illegal, the non certified modems where illegal. Spain had the same regulations where it was illegal to even plug in a non Telefónica phone. Only approved equipment was allowed to be plugged in. Not that they would know what you had in your home, so even if illegal it was hardly enforced.

Those rules there never in forced here, no BBSes were ever raided, despite some of them having a large amount of 'warez'...
The only thing that really annoyed the state phone company was when the banks started to reduce their number of dedicated leased (very expensive) lines and just replaced them with normal ones with modems on each end. In the 80's phone calls were not timed, so the banks would just leave the modems connected 24/7.  Once the phone company copped on to this the previously rock solid 24h phone lines liked to drop their connections every few hours, or so I was told by those in the know ;-)

Modems were very expensive here. My first modem was an surplus Prestel 1200/75 baud ISA modem card, I think I got it from Bull http://www.bullnet.co.uk/contact.htm in the UK. It never worked well and I eventually used its MAX232 chip in a decoder card for the old analog Astra satellites.  Then got a V22bis from the UK, V32bis (Supra) from the US etc. 

[SeanB]

That change probably coincided with the replacement of the old electromechanical exchanges with the fully electronic ones, where you could program a call timer to do the disconnect automatically.

[GEuser]

I red the 1st page and then the previous one , I must be way behind the times as in the 80's I was just starting out on valves (tubes) in the hobby , it was tremendous fun with all sorts of stuff , plenty of book reading as I never saw the internets until 2000 or so .

RSGB handbooks were real good .

[WarSim]

There must have been large availability differences from country to country.  When I started in the late 60 to 70s with computing sciences it was the last of the punch cards which quickly switched to the 12 1/2" hard case floppy then the actual 12" floppy. 
Acoustic Modem wise starting with a 30 or 80 baud modem but no Usenet just NISTA at first (sorry a bit fuzzy on the actual acronym).
Etching wise obtaining copper clad if you where not a board house was effectively impossible.  I had to start with applica on epoxy board (called resin boards now) or fibre board (like HDF). 
Apparently by the time lines stated here there was a up to a 30 year delay for Canada.  Surprising to sat the least. 


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[fcb]

You were lucky. In the 1980's the only places here that had computers were the banks ( IBM mainframes and dedicated banking terminals in the branches, and with a printer that was either a Diablo or a specialised one to print in the account books), in the university ( HP mainframe, complete with robed attendants), and a few large businesses where a computer was used to do some specialised functions like accounting, data processing or such. Personal computers were mosly the very expensive ZX ones, and some schools had Apple ]['s in a room.

By 1990 you had companies offering PC clones and networking to business for accounts, inventory and such, all with a service contract and yearly fees that included then an annual service ( dedust and check it works well) and support by a trained technician.

Internet was something that was offered via a gateway on the Prestel clone operated by the national TELCO, and was just a page where you got a UNIX shell to use. Modems were 300 baud, 1200/75 or later 2400baud. Then came the first 19200 baud units ( what speed) and they pretty much stayed that way till you had 56k modems, which are still common as ADSL is not going to ever work on some of the old long copper lines. You still buy them new here.

The ZX (I'm assuming you meant ZX80/81/Spectrum) was anything but expensive.  I got given a ZX80 in 1980 (my grandma bought one  to do her accounts on - gave it me when she got bored of writting her own accounts software...), my brother and I got a ZX81 for Christmas in 1981 and a Spectrum 48K the  year after.  I seem to remember the ZX81 being £49.95 and the 16K Memopak was the same again (including velcro pad for holding it in place) - we programmed it that much that we ended up having to use meccano rods to work the membrane keypad.

[netdudeuk]

It was fifty quid for the kit, which I bought and waited six weeks for and the assembled one was quite a bit more but came with a mains adapter.