It's been a long time since I attempted anything serious with out continuous power and ground planes. With large synchronous circuits, there tends to be power-to-gnd noise every time the active clock edge occurs. If you have 80-120 IC's mostly clocked stuff, all operating from the same clock, you NEED to have your bypass cap's in intimate contact with your IC supply pins. That's hard to do without those planes. Even on the old boards before I had all my boards made with those power and gnd planes, I used #20 wire to provide Vcc and Gnd to each IC and bypassed it right at the power/gnd connection.

With the planes, the noise occurs on the common grid, each path on which is minimally long and averages the noise, hence, minimizing any random noise. I once built a large, wire-wrapped, integer arithmetic circuit containing over 200 IC's on a board with planes, and was able to keep the power-gnd noise down to about 50 mV despite the fact it was all SCHOTTKY logic.

I bought a Vector board without power/gnd planes for the ISA bus back in '88 or so, and have yet to use it. At one point I had someone solder on the terminals. It has yet to be used. Tightwad that I am, I'd say that, having spent $60 (back when a dollar was a dollar, and not just the price of a candy-bar) on such a board, yet not used it for anything, I'd say it means I view them as useless.

RE