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Was this a thing? Looping diodes on vintage card assembly

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snuci:
I recently bought a loose MITS Altair 8800 CPU board plus a couple of other related boards.  These boards, when bought in a kit, were assembled by the purchaser.  These boards would have been assembled in 1975 and I have never seen this type of assembly.  Was this done at the time or a flourish? I've never seen this before and I have lots of vintage computer equipment of the era.  Is there any advantage or disadvantage of doing this?  I am guessing it's not necessarily a good thing.  This was done with diodes on two boards.

tsman:
Only reason I can think of is that they didn't want to risk cracking the glass body *shrug*

David Hess:
No, it was not common.  I do not remember ever seeing that except on prototypes.

Preventing cracking of the glass package is what occurs to me also; I had that happen before I made it a habit of using a lead bender.

I have occasionally done the same thing though to make test points.

mariush:
I suppose it could be also to make leads longer and let them act as a heatsink.

Also thought maybe they used some plastic or wood something to keep diodes in place by having some stick or needle through the loops to keep diodes at certain height, while circuit board goes through wave soldering machine.... but there are lead forming machine which can form leads to keep diodes at certain height.

Another thought would be those tiny loops will act as a couple of very tiny inductors reducing component count.

 

Stray Electron:
  Making the leads shorter not longer would help the diode cooling since the PCB would act as a better heat sink than the excessively long leads.   I built a number of kits from MITS back in the day and also owned two Altairs, one factory assembled, but I've never seen the leads looped like that.  Did they put loops in any other leads than the diodes?

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