I've been using these breadboards for about 20 years now and I still like them for a lot of things. They certainly aren't good for all possibilities, but I regularly do digital logic into the 50 MHz range with them and have few problems. Modern CMOS logic families seem to be a lot more forgiving for poor bypassing and high-impedance power sources than good old-fashioned "straight" TTL. In fact, just for fun, I've pulled out *all* the bypass capacitors around a 40 MHz HC TTL circuit and found that it operated identically to before the bypass capacitors were pulled. Compare this to old-fashioned straight 7400-series logic where if I don't put bypass capacitors everywhere all the flip flops randomly choose a new state every time the clock ticks! On the subject of breadboarding with solder and wires: are there PC-boards designed specifically for "place-and-tack" surface-mount prototyping? I'm envisioning a power grid, a bunch of SOIC pads with small fanout, a place for some surface-mount discrete parts, and maybe some way of putting a header connector on the board. That'd be really useful. Sort of like those through-hole prototyping PC boards that used to be popular. Tim.