The beginning of SMT, old equipment

[jmelson]

@Jon, those pictures are just way too cool! Thanks.

IIRC, those military ceramic/gold flatpacks weren't soldered, but welded to the PCB (which is probably also ceramic). Can you confirm?

I had a program loading/test console that came with the computer where the chips were ultrasonically welded to pins on the boards.
Then, the backs of the boards had something like wire-wrap wire ultrasonically welded to the pins.

But, this Alert computer is NOT built that way.  The chips are, as far as I can tell, HAND soldered to the glass-epoxy boards.
Some of the boards in the middle of the machine have LOTS of patch wires and glued-on chips on them.

The circuit modules have no traces on the outside of the modules.  All power and signal traces are buried inside the boards.
There is a massively thick motherboard that must have lots of layers to interconnect everything.

Also, as far as I can tell, the computer still works.  The first time I powered it up, I verified I could "jam in" 1's or 0's to most of the registers, but couldn't get it to clock.  The major registers have set and reset pins of the FFs brought out to connectors for this.  Later, I found you needed to supply -6 V for the clock generator.  Then, I could jam instructions into the memory read connector and the memory address would count up an various rates.  The multiply is a lot slower than add.  That is as far as I got with it.

Jon