Retro Gizmos: The 1974 Breadboard Venture
It is difficult to envision experimenting with electronics without having the ubiquitous solderless breadboard. We are sure you have a couple within arm’s attain. The very little plastic miracles make it quick to throw jointly a circuit, try it, and then tear it down once more. But, shockingly, breadboards of that kind have not normally been all around, and — for a although — they have been also an high-priced product. Probably which is what determined [R. G. Cooper] to create Slip-n-Clip — his technique for rapidly setting up circuits that he revealed in a 1974 edition of the magazine Elementary Electronics.
The system is not really what you would think of as a breadboard these days, but it was effective and unquestionably cheap to establish. The largest difficulty? It was not some thing you’d use with DIP ICs. But in the early 1970s, you might not be constructing very much with ICs, and the types you employed may possibly be in oddball transistor-like packages. Issues ended up bizarre in the 70s!
A Brief Heritage of Breadboards
In the incredibly outdated days, people today built radios and this sort of on wood substrates that were being really bread-cutting boards. Which is where the identify arrived from. It was widespread to draw a diagram with the bodily layout you experienced in thoughts, glue it to the board, and use it as a guide for developing and troubleshooting. Wood was easy to drill and lower. A nail or a thumbtack would make dandy terminals. Possibly the final time we saw that completed was about a dozen yrs in the past in Make Journal. Even then, it was only a novelty — couple individuals still make circuits like this, but you can see how [Colin] did it in the online video below.
If you experienced students developing circuits, this could be a genuine drag. So, unsurprisingly, [Orville Thompson] from DeVry Technological Institute received a patent in 1960 for a spring-loaded solderless breadboard. Innovative, but not pretty how we know them nowadays.
Not Rather There
[Thompson’s] breadboard was a lot more like a spring-loaded patch panel. This would be useful for points you may possibly establish on a real breadboard, but in a decade or two, ICs in DIP offers would come to be a big point.
In 1971, [Ronald Portugal], doing the job for E&L Devices, figured out that there would be a industry for a board with spring contacts that could acknowledge DIP chips. The patent shows a little something you’d very easily identify now. AP Products and solutions claimed they’d been making solderless breadboards considering that 1968, but we imagine they appeared a great deal various.
Of study course, breadboards weren’t a popular fixture in passion labs in 1971. By 1977, although, they were being compact breadboards in the Radio Shack catalog for $9.95 — about 50 percent the price tag of lava lamp and well worth about $50 in today’s funds. In 1976, a 6×7 inch breadboard from AP was about $50.
Back in 1974
In the meantime, back in 1974, [Cooper] wished to set collectively circuits very easily. His resolution? A wooden board, some copper pipe, rubber bands, and paper clips. The strategy was very simple. Drill holes in a piece of plywood to variety a grid. The holes have been just major sufficient to go 1-inch items of copper pipe via them. Epoxy would hold the pipes in permanently.
That leaves the springs. A piece of scrap wooden and some nails make a jig for bending paper clips into hooks that grab the lip of the copper pipe. They also get rubber bands, so there are two hooks in two various pipes hooked up to every single rubber band. When you pull up on one hook, the other hook pulls back again against you. Slip your wire or element under the hook, and the rubber band pressure will hold it in spot.
Some very simple labels finish up the board. Not a terrible undertaking, and for some circuits, it may well be even far better than a conventional solderless breadboard. Of study course, not DIP IC helpful at all.
We can see how this would have been an cost-effective solution. You in all probability experienced scrap wood, paper clips, and rubber bands hanging all over. Copper pipe is common ample, also. By contrast, a 1976 Heathkit catalog touted the new Heathkit ET-3300 breadboard. Four breadboards were being mounted in a case with a triple-mounted (+5, +12, and -12) energy provide. While $80 doesn’t seem like that a lot, that was a 3rd of the median US weekly wage in 1976. You also saw a lot of breadboards in cases with factors like LEDs, switches, and other exterior components, but they ended up not low-cost, either. You can see [Lee Adamson] fixing an ET-3300 in the movie below.
So we can see what may possibly encourage you to come across a piece of scrap wooden and stick some pipes in it. Are we suggesting you do the exact same? Probably not. Though for the proper job, it would give a decidedly nostalgic and fascinating appear. With a very little decoration, it would almost certainly search great for a steampunk make, for case in point.
E&L Instruments literally invented the fashionable breadboard, but you really don’t really feel of their title as synonymous with the item. Perhaps due to the fact they value $1,300 back then. You can see [CuriousMarc] tear down a person he calls an “eBay Disaster” in the movie beneath.
No Fame
The Slip-n-Clip was in no way extremely famed, we think about. But it was a excellent example of how ingenious men and women were being when they could not just get low-priced things from the comfort of their sofa. We ponder if any one reading this essentially designed one again in the day. Permit us know in the comments.
Everyone “knows” that solderless breadboard have a whole lot of added capacitance and other undesirable circuit parameters. But how undesirable is it, truly? We’ve witnessed them matter to all sorts of surgical treatment and even downright torture.