28 Feb
2008
28 Feb
'08
9:19 a.m.
From: "jim s":
I have access to a couple of Standard wire wrap
machines, and the lady
who used to run it, if anyone can get an idea how to do the boards, and
get the paper tapes. I wonder if it is worth the effort of wirewrap,
since the connectors don't have wirewrap tails?
If you've got access to an automated wrap machine, it seems more plausible
to just use that to wire up some full sized backplanes, DEC style :-).
It should be no problem to massage the wire list into whatever format
the wrap machine needs.
Then you could use full size flip-chips, through hole parts, and make
the whole thing that much more authentic.
It's been a while since I looked at what goes on
with the DEC backplanes
and wirewrap. Do they populate pins regardless of the connectors having
wirewrap tails, or are the pins mostly from the connectors?
The DEC connector blocks have sockets arranged in a 4x2 grid, and the
sockets each have 36 wire-wrap pins/tails. Those are soldered to the
PCB in some of the later gear, or just wire-wrapped in the older gear.
There was also a metal strip with holes in it that alternated little
hole, big hole, that was soldered to every other pin in a row for
power bussing. (The small holes got soldered to the pin, the big
ones left a gap around the pin from the other side of the edge connector.
If you get into the really old gear, there were fewer wire-wrap pins,
and heavier guage wire was used for the wraps. Hopefully we can ignore
that stuff, as none of the tooling or connectors are readily available.
Vince
(BTW, I still don't seem to be able to mail to the list from the address
I'm getting list mail from.)