the pcbs are stacked with components soldered in between them, cordwood style.
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yeah looks like this has been taken apart before. https://cs.lbl.gov/news-media/news/2018/berkeley-lab-staff-bringing-expertise-computing-artifacts-to-sc18/ check out that cordwood construction. really sucks if a part dies in the middle of the board @tubetime Yeah, the only circuits I've ever seen that look like that are Seymour's. (If it's from a CDC-6600, the transistors should all be CDC-nnn named, because he had to special order them because he wanted silicon instead of germanium.) Tube🍂Time, but that's the only way they could pack components as densely at the time, isn't it? @tubetime the symmetry of the components and placement though. This was designed and assembled with passion. @tubetime @MLE_online oh not this specific module, just in general. "some other folks have taken apart other examples, so the internals are *known*" @tubetime Good ol' ferrite core memory. Ever wondered why when we want to debug a crashing program we take a *core dump* ? 🙂 @tubetime Ooh look what I found. I read this years ago because of course the U of MN library has a copy. But now there’s a pdf available: @tubetime I bought one some time ago and indeed it was sold as a CDC computer part |
I want to look at the individual cores but this thing is *soldered together* so if I want to get inside, I'll need to desolder like 63746875 wired connections. should I even try?