PCB manufacture back in the day - How expensive was it?

[tesla500]

We hear all the time about how it was insanely expensive to have "full featured" PCBs made back in the day (say 80s or early 90s). I'm curious as to just how expensive it was.

Does anyone who worked back then remember just how much it actually cost to get a small prototype run of 2 layer/soldermask/slikscreen boards produced, and how long it took? In fact, any data points would be interesting, from single layer, up to multilayer with impedance control (did that even exist back then?)

[calexanian]

Quick turn boards ran the gambit. There used to be a number of local shops, but in the days before CAD we had to lay donuts and tape and have litho copies made. Some houses needed a drill location litho also. Most would just manual drill. Then they would process the boards and it would take about a week if you really threw your back into it. In regular production in 100 to 250 piece quantity for double sided FRG boards 1oz copper plated through, solder masked and single side silk I remember for one of our boards in the 80's that was about 8 X 10 inches that they were in the 12.50 to 15 dollar range depending. Those were some great boards too. Way better than the cheap arse garbage we get today. When quick turn came about in the early 90's when you could upload the gerbers vis dial up there were a few houses around doing it. Advanced circuits was always the biggest, and still are. I remember standard spec for boards ordered on Friday and delivered via UPS next day the following Friday being a $350 screen setup fee and then like 75 dollars a board or so depending on size. I can't recall the per inch price but I am sure it was high. $600 was not uncommon to get 2 boards in a week. Then by the late 90's they had one day turn and the prices started coming down. I recall something like $150 each for up to 60 square inch boards 3 day turn. Now its 3 for 33 each for like a 5 day turn or something like that. They run deals. I use their bare bones service these days. No mask or silkscreen but they are 1 day turn and very reasonably prices. They used to be like a $25 setup fee and 50 cents a square inch or something like that, but it has gone up a bit  think, but still amazing to basically get a few dozen small boards in a few days for around $150 or so with shipping.

[Codemonkey]

I've just found a purchase order form from 2004 for 20 x small double layer boards to be produced on a 5 day turnaround:

Board cost £24.33 each
ATE £120 (bare board test)
Photography £72

so, a total of £678.60 for 20 very simple boards no bigger than 10 x 5cm

Edit:
Forgot to add, those prices didn't include VAT at 20%!

[Kjelt]

I remember that as a hobbieist I wanted to produce a few boards early 90's.
No way you could do that if you were not a company. There was no internet, so you telephone the company, you were lucky if you made it past the switchboard to a salesperson that would figure out in 2 minutes that this was not mass production big $ deal so he just would brush you off (scare you off) by telling that the intake (setup) costs would exceed a few hundred guilders ($150 incl. making the negatives for lighting the photoresist) and per eurosize pcb you should count on a 25 guilders a piece at least, for two layers. They also had to convert my ultiboard files on floppy  to some industrial software they used, lot of blabla.
So it would have cost me back then at least €300 for a few 2-layer boards due to the costs of the manual intake process.

[Alex Eisenhut]

We hear all the time about how it was insanely expensive to have "full featured" PCBs made back in the day (say 80s or early 90s). I'm curious as to just how expensive it was.

Does anyone who worked back then remember just how much it actually cost to get a small prototype run of 2 layer/soldermask/slikscreen boards produced, and how long it took? In fact, any data points would be interesting, from single layer, up to multilayer with impedance control (did that even exist back then?)

Yes, I paid something like 300$/cdn for 3 double-sided boards about 4x5 inches each , about 1994, 1995? Although they did have a plating bar for hard gold edge connectors, and I asked for beveling of the edge. 

Oh yeah, sending files consisted of z-modeming them to their BBS. It was local to Montreal. They're no longer around.

If you're interested, you can see how they used to do it in the 1960s, when Tektronix was making GHz sampling scopes with PCBs in them.

http://www.vintagetek.org/tektronix-printed-circuit-boards-1969/

I don't know what you mean by "did that exist back then". Did what exist? The notion of impedance? Impedance control? Multi layer boards?

All that existed in the 1960s, but certainly only for military or high grade industrial stuff. I have musty books from the 60s with multi-layer backplanes and the first auto-routers described, as well as the rules of thumb and empirical formulas for figuring out trace widths to achieve an impedance.

I also remember we etched boards at school, that's how I made my lab power supply. It was modest, but we used a program called smARTWORK. It was a fast way of drawing pads and lines on a grid, no netlist or fancy stuff like that!

http://vetusware.com/download/smARTWORK%201.3%20r4/?id=7878

We got that onto PCBs, probably by UV, and etched in persulphate and drilled them. This was early '90s.