12 Sep
2004
12 Sep
'04
7:51 p.m.
On Sun, Sep 12, 2004 at 09:37:08PM -0700, Peter C. Wallace wrote:
BTW none of our current PCB vendors count
vias or holes anymore when quoting, only total area.
That's a nice change from the past (not that it affects most
commercial designs, I'm sure). How is gold priced these days?
The last board I had made in bulk was the GG2 Bus+ board - huge
by many standards - big enough for a 100-pin Zorro edge plus
a full ISA bus (36 + 62 pins). At q. 100, I was getting them
for about $15 blank, plus shipping, after setup charges (2 layer)
I've always wanted to make a successor to the Qbus COMBOARD (since
I have exactly one working one left, one blank PCB, and one assembled
unit I pried off the trade show booth that was probably DOA in 1985).
The trick would be cost - a 1 sq ft 6 layer board with lots of gold
at the bottom - I'm sure I couldn't afford to make more than a proto
run, just because it would be for personal use, not a commercial
product (what I _wish_ I could find would be a couple original ones
from the field on the 3rd party market, but we were
never as prolific
with our Qbus boards as, say, Simpact, so nobody trades our old
stuff).
I'd probably redesign it to replace the parallel port with a SCSI port.
2 x serial + SCSI is more interesting these days than 2 x serial +
line printer.
-ethan
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