Huge Lot of Columbus Works PCB Fab Ephemera

[segaloco]

Hello everyone, I've got exciting news.  I recently closed on an auction and received a bin of materials from Columbus Works in the '60s pertaining to the PCB fabrication for the ESS.  This includes descriptions of the workflow, flowcharts, original art masters, board specimens, and tons of engineering drawings and schematics, attached are a few photos.  Would attach more but despite only using 3.8MB of attachment space, the forum seems to also cap attachments at 6.  If this is to ensure that the 60MB is also encompassing the inodes and block header information on disk, you can rest assured this is diminishing returns, adding a 7th file of similar size to the others, for instance, would add about 0.5MB of data to the disk give or take the probably less than KB total required to populate the filesystem metadata...so I can't wrap my head around why I can't attach more, but I can't.  Might attach more in a future reply but I intend on scanning all of this to PDF anyway.

Anywho, there is a binder with sections describing the physical and design aspects of PCB production, along with photos of the line, flowcharts (down to the individual rooms in Columbus Works to carry a process through), engineering diagrams and schematics of various ESS circuit cards, floorplans for the building, art masters and request sheets, all sorts of stuff.  In some sense it's like having the source code to Columbus Works's PCB fab.  I've already got plans to do some small R&D in a screen printing studio here in town, see if I can approximate steps of the process.  With any luck I'll be able to produce at least some simple copper art on substrates, proving the process, and we could always dial it in if we wanted to get serious about it.

In addition to all of that, there are also circuit cards at each step of the process, from blank substrate to a completed ESS circuit card in the plastic carrier.  One oddball I got in the process is a 3B20 card from the early 90s, particularly significant to me in that it has a MAC-8 (specifically WE212E) on it.  Prior to finding this, the latest MAC-8 I was aware of was the WE212C, found on some later MAC Tutor units (the preproduction ones also have preprod MAC-8s which were labeled F60708, the R&D code rather than WECo production code WE212).  Even better, it's socketed rather than soldered in, so someday I may be able to pop it off and do some bare-bones experiments.  Cool too is that there are 4 EPROMs on the board, 3 of them are also socketed so should be easy to read, standard Ti 2716 EPROMs.  The fourth is also a 2716 but is soldered on, I actually don't want to disassemble this board so I am gonna try and fabricate something I can kinda snap on top of the EPROM that'll touch the pins...although I then do have to worry about transients trying to go the other direction down the line rather than into the chip...tricky tricky.  The other option is to figure out the board in entirety then just swap out the program ROM, use the board itself *as* the ROM dumper for the remaining ROM, but we'll see.

So lots of exciting stuff, I'll be getting started on scans of this soon hopefully, in the meantime if anyone has any thoughts or questions happy to dig around stuff.

[poplar1]

Would attach more but despite only using 3.8MB of attachment space, the forum seems to also cap attachments at 6.

Just create a reply to your post and you can add 6 for each reply.