17 Apr
2012
17 Apr
'12
7:35 p.m.
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 9:56 PM, David Griffith <dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu> wrote:
Who was the one with the wacky idea of building a Straight-Eight PDP8 using
flipchip cards populated with surface-mount parts? ?I have a hankering to
run some numbers about it.
I remember discussing the topic with Vince Slyngstad. I just had wild
ideas - he had practical ideas.
There were two approaches discussed - miniaturized SMT Flip Chips
mounted on some sort of backplane interconnect, or one or two boards
large enough to contain the circuit of a Straight-8 but without the
modularity. The costs of thousands of pins put a damper on the
practical implementation of the first kind, and the cost of hundreds
of square inches of small-run PCBs put a damper on the second
approach.
Vince would probably be the one who ran numbers.
I still think it's a neat idea, but likely to be too expensive to
undertake casually.
-ethan