I'm 41. I have wire-wrapped enough boards to know that I hate it. As a young engineer, I did a project using Cypress PALs and an async FIFO chip and it was wirewrapped, and had serious issues with double-clocking. The data sheets for the PAL said, "do not use wire wrap as the CMOS edge rates are much faster than LSTTL." I guess Cypress was right and much games were played with termination to get it to work. Interestingly enough, swapping in an AMD FIFO chip in place of the Cypress part improved performance. I know I spent more time dicking around with the board, trying to get it to work, than it would have cost to have a proper PCB done.

Friends have a recording studio here in town, and they have a Neve 8128 console. The cross-point and the digital switching are all down on 6U wire-wrap cards. The docs for the desk even include a print-out of the wire list. A lot of that stuff is all 4000B-series CMOS. Yikes. We've talked about replacing the Z80-based computer board and all of the control stuff (which is dodgy) with a new PCB for the bus assignment switches, muting and control, and add a modern micro with USB so the whole thing could also be run from a computer. Problem is that the console really doesn't sound all that great and the cost of retrofit exceeds what the desk is worth.

-a