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RE: Ah, when disk drives looked like washing machines

Posted by AbeCollins (A) on July 31, 2024 at 19:08:24

In Reply to: Ah, when disk drives looked like washing machines posted by jedrider on July 31, 2024 at 12:47:55:

I worked for Calay Systems in the early 1980's, a manufacturer of CAD systems for automatic layout of printed circuit boards. I traveled the country installing and training customers on Calay "rip-up and reroute" systems. It basically went through several hundred iterations over night or longer to arrive at the best PCB trace layout for the components list it was given to work with.

Our system was based on the Q-BUS DEC LSI-11 that ran the RT-11 OS.

These systems would find the most efficient way to make connections between electronic components on a PCB. The resulting Gerber files were then sent off to a service that would convert the files into actual multi-layered printed circuit boards.

We interacted with the DEC via VT-101 terminal but the PCB designers used a mouse and a crude and hugely heavy color CRT. I don't recall what the color graphics subsystem was comprised of. I think it may have been proprietary.

• Rip-Up and Reroute   (Open in New Window)

Edits: 07/31/24 07/31/24

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