PCB History

[SimonR]

Found this video of the Tektronix PCB process from 1969. I thought about posting in general chat but I think its better here. Even for its age its still quite educational. It's amazing how much has changed, but its equally amazing how much is still the same.

[Alex Eisenhut]

Not only informative; but relaxing to watch.

[Joel_l]

I remember doing that in the early 80s. We used to layout boards with tape and stencils on a light table, usually at 4X. When that was done, run a brown line to proof against the schematic. When it checked out, took the sheets to a photo lab to get reduced to 1:1. Then took the film to the board house to be made. At that time, things were just starting to change. The company I worked for had just bought it's first cad system, I think I did one of the last boards with tape. The board house had just started digitizing the film. That's when rip-up really meant rip-up.

[SimonR]

Same for me when I first started in industry in 1988, I just missed the missed the tape layout 4x method, although I did have to send some existing taped layouts for manufacture.
My company had just installed some very expensive workstation based CAD systems.
As an electronics engineer I had access to the schematic capture system but the drawing office was in charge board layout and component entry. I didn't have to generate gerbers but did have to sign off the component, the board layouts and then I had to physically sign the gerber plots themselves when the came back from the printers.

[ar__systems]

Not only informative; but relaxing to watch.

Relaxing? I'm getting a headache just thinking about doing it that way

[pepelevamp]

This is a really great video.
Some times you can feel a bit more confident in things when you see the experts learning processes for the first time too.

[Jeffpcb]

Nice video!
learn much from it!thanks!

[jpanhalt]

Appeared here at least once before: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/pcb-manufacture-back-in-the-day-how-expensive-was-it/msg612641/#msg612641   (See: First link therin)

Maybe this sort of thing should be indexed for easy reference?

John