Western Electric, which was, years ago, the manufacturing wing of Bell Laboratories, built custom PBX's (private branch exchange) that were those things you saw in the old newsreels with "Mildred" the operator plugging plugging in cables to make connections from the outside world to an internal line.

Since these were often one-off's, they were hand-wired, sometimes from wire-lists alone and sometimes hand-wired with the aid of a machine to point out the correct pins automatically. I nearly bought one of these machines recently. I didn't want to pay the $90 + freight, though, since it's likely I'd have had to write the code to drive the thing and certainly would have had to write code to interpret the wire lists from my schematic capture program.

Erik's right, BTW, in that there were huge and costly computer driven (not by PC's) machines that automatically (a) ensured that all the pins on a board were properly straightened, and (b) placed all the wires using pre-programmed color and gauge.

RE