At VCFMW last month, my table was adjacent to Lorraine and her friends.
Ben Heck walked by during setup, and asked me what it was. I was clueless, so we started making educated guesses. The Amiga poster was a start.
I do wire-wrap. This thing is a marvel to behold. It is quite orderly, but could have used colors more effectively.
The three units implement the VLSI chips and the main board of the Amiga that was first shown at CES (I believe.)
Each VLSI is a stack of PCB such as you might get from Vector, with columns of pads for ICs in wire-wrap sockets, buss bars, and edge areas having mounting holes for connectors. The layers are connected by ribbon cables.
(they are not called breadboard!)
Wire wrap is a superior technology. There are no cold solder joints. They are gas-tight.
It is not hard to debug. If you follow some rules, and don't make a spaghetti bird's nest.
Such workmanship can be seen on minicomputers of the early 1970s.
Whole computers were made by wire-wrap around MSI chips. My wire-wrapped PDP-11/10 functioned perfectly thru the 1990s.
Recently, I implemented a microcomputer design in wire-wrap. That was enjoyable!
My design was captured in KiCad, laid out as a PCB, which I translated to perf-board and wire-wrap sockets
This approach is perfect for prototyping, as you can simply add new blocks.
Forbodingly, the article signs off with "Amiga, please don't join the sorrowful ranks that have wasted technological superiority through marketing muck-ups."
What a godawful mess that must have been to debug. I've never used wirewrap, it looks awful to me.
I am trying to imagine what it would have been like to design such a system using only pencil and paper. Going from block diagram to the lowest level, just on big sheets of paper... the pencil sharpeners must have been emptied twice a day.
Never seen wire wrapped boards besides photos of this and maybe some other early micro. So of course I had to do a little search and one of the first results has Bil Herd from Commodore (Plus/4, C128...) explaining it.
When I was a kid I had a Dragon32 and my little brother had an Amiga 500. I thought it was so cool with the demos and the sound but he was always getting worms that spread via floppy disc.
If you really take seriously what you could have done for a home computer if you had started with fully integrated chips, its actually insane.
Imagine if you had an Amiga Chipset and you had combined it with a RISC like chip. If you did that in late 70s with 3.5μm HMOS (like 68k). The resulting system would be insane, in terms of performance to cost. You could outperform minicomputers that cost 10-100x more.
The ARM2 like chip and the complete Amiga chipset seem to have less transistors then a single 68k, so the price off such a system would be very low. And we can see that with the Amiga, what really blows my mind is how cheap Amiga ended up being, an unbelievable achievment.
Its seem the issue really was the the companies that had the resources to do that amount of chip design knowlage and finances were not interest in making a home computers/workstation. Workstation ended up being made by startups who didn't have the resources to do so much costume work. Appollo was a split-off group DEC because DEC was not interested in workstations. IBM was just to slow and couldn't really do prodcut design, and we all know how the eventually got around that problem with the PC. Apple for the Mac did try to do one ambitious chip with VSLI but didn't end up using it.
The split between computer companies and chip design company was just to big to get the needed amount of integration, and there was clearly a lacking vision for what home computer could be. Jobs vision for the Macintosh went in the right direction, but really Jay Mine had the right vision, and he had it because he build a computer for himself. He wanted a home comptuer that was fast, had a proper operating system and enough media capability to run a flight simulator software. Sadly manamgent most of the time wanted him to develop a console and later when they allowed a home computer they didn't share his full vision.
But then also actually plulling this vision off, multi-chip costume design with very few resources is just an amazing achievment. And many of the people didn't even have that much knowlage in chip design, there was a lot of competition for chip design people. Getting into Commmodore where they had the actual semiconductor teams to get these designs over the line was lucky, many other companies who could have bought them might have messed this up.
In a perfect world you add ARM2-like RISC chip, a Sun-like costume MMU to something like Amiga Chipset and you move computing forward by 10+ years. In reality the exact opposite won, a 16-bit PC that had basically no costume design in it what so ever.
The failure of the Amiga and the near-failure and resurrection of Apple is what makes me believe in parallel universes/alternate timelines more than anything :)
Picture gallery: Amiga prototype "Lorraine" at the Amiga 40 event
(amiga-news.de)163 points by doener 13 hours ago | 63 comments
Comments
Ben Heck walked by during setup, and asked me what it was. I was clueless, so we started making educated guesses. The Amiga poster was a start.
I do wire-wrap. This thing is a marvel to behold. It is quite orderly, but could have used colors more effectively.
The three units implement the VLSI chips and the main board of the Amiga that was first shown at CES (I believe.)
Each VLSI is a stack of PCB such as you might get from Vector, with columns of pads for ICs in wire-wrap sockets, buss bars, and edge areas having mounting holes for connectors. The layers are connected by ribbon cables.
(they are not called breadboard!)
Wire wrap is a superior technology. There are no cold solder joints. They are gas-tight.
It is not hard to debug. If you follow some rules, and don't make a spaghetti bird's nest.
Such workmanship can be seen on minicomputers of the early 1970s.
Whole computers were made by wire-wrap around MSI chips. My wire-wrapped PDP-11/10 functioned perfectly thru the 1990s.
Recently, I implemented a microcomputer design in wire-wrap. That was enjoyable!
My design was captured in KiCad, laid out as a PCB, which I translated to perf-board and wire-wrap sockets
This approach is perfect for prototyping, as you can simply add new blocks.
https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v10n4/150_Amiga_Lorr...
Forbodingly, the article signs off with "Amiga, please don't join the sorrowful ranks that have wasted technological superiority through marketing muck-ups."
I am trying to imagine what it would have been like to design such a system using only pencil and paper. Going from block diagram to the lowest level, just on big sheets of paper... the pencil sharpeners must have been emptied twice a day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXvEDM-m9CE
Imagine if you had an Amiga Chipset and you had combined it with a RISC like chip. If you did that in late 70s with 3.5μm HMOS (like 68k). The resulting system would be insane, in terms of performance to cost. You could outperform minicomputers that cost 10-100x more.
The ARM2 like chip and the complete Amiga chipset seem to have less transistors then a single 68k, so the price off such a system would be very low. And we can see that with the Amiga, what really blows my mind is how cheap Amiga ended up being, an unbelievable achievment.
Its seem the issue really was the the companies that had the resources to do that amount of chip design knowlage and finances were not interest in making a home computers/workstation. Workstation ended up being made by startups who didn't have the resources to do so much costume work. Appollo was a split-off group DEC because DEC was not interested in workstations. IBM was just to slow and couldn't really do prodcut design, and we all know how the eventually got around that problem with the PC. Apple for the Mac did try to do one ambitious chip with VSLI but didn't end up using it.
The split between computer companies and chip design company was just to big to get the needed amount of integration, and there was clearly a lacking vision for what home computer could be. Jobs vision for the Macintosh went in the right direction, but really Jay Mine had the right vision, and he had it because he build a computer for himself. He wanted a home comptuer that was fast, had a proper operating system and enough media capability to run a flight simulator software. Sadly manamgent most of the time wanted him to develop a console and later when they allowed a home computer they didn't share his full vision.
But then also actually plulling this vision off, multi-chip costume design with very few resources is just an amazing achievment. And many of the people didn't even have that much knowlage in chip design, there was a lot of competition for chip design people. Getting into Commmodore where they had the actual semiconductor teams to get these designs over the line was lucky, many other companies who could have bought them might have messed this up.
In a perfect world you add ARM2-like RISC chip, a Sun-like costume MMU to something like Amiga Chipset and you move computing forward by 10+ years. In reality the exact opposite won, a 16-bit PC that had basically no costume design in it what so ever.
https://www.amiga-news.de/pics/L/lorraine/FB_IMG_17610203985...