Picture gallery: Amiga prototype "Lorraine" at the Amiga 40 event
14 comments
·October 28, 2025tonijn
Looks like a beehive. Very cool
yzydserd
The display was in a booth replicating the 1984 Winter CES booth. Here is a Creative Computing article from the 1984 event.
https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v10n4/150_Amiga_Lorr...
Forbodingly, the article signs off with "Amiga, please don't join the sorrowful ranks that have wasted technological superiority through marketing muck-ups."
krige
Well, lucky Amiga, it was wasted by executive muck-ups rather than mere marketing foibles.
Schlagbohrer
What a godawful mess that must have been to debug. I've never used wirewrap, it looks awful to me.
I am trying to imagine what it would have been like to design such a system using only pencil and paper. Going from block diagram to the lowest level, just on big sheets of paper... the pencil sharpeners must have been emptied twice a day.
Gibbon1
The existence of wire wrap tells you a lot how painfully tedious it was to layout PCB's at the time. I did a couple of wire wrap boards. But eventually just started soldering wire wrap wire to the sockets. By the early 90's it was faster to layout a PCB and have it fabbed. Bonus you could outsource that and use the 3-4 weeks to do less tedious things.
This is just around the time that programmable logic became readily available. It'd be much easier to iterate with that than wiring up logic gates. Last 30 years you can do all this debugging with simulations and then test using FPGA's.
FarmerPotato
Present day: I can fabricate a wire-wrap version from my PCB footprints, much faster than I can route the PCB!
With wire-wrap, you can route multiple traces between the same pins, or I like to neatly bundle a whole bus' worth.
I'm far more pleased with the results of my wire-wrap, than the quality of my SMT soldering once I get a PCB made.
I had a tutor for wire-wrap in the 1980s. But I'm self-taught in PCB routing, and I start it over at least 3 times.
FarmerPotato
I'm old-young enough to be aware of the evolution of minicomputers implemented in MSI TTL with wire-wrap (1970) to VLSI integration (1975). Examples are the LSI-11 and TMS9900.
My first home-brew micro was done in 1987 using the Radio Shack hand-tool and an OK Industries' motorized wrap gun.
Now, I add CPLD to my wire-wrap designs! Just like on an iterated PCB, you must lock the physical pins to functions.
Lio
I love this, it’s like a holy relic. :D
Jolter
I’m amazed someone preserved that! In whose ownership is it currently?
verytrivial
Wire wrap is/was an underrated prototyping technique prior to PCB automation. Nasa flew missions with wire wrap boards.
mikepurvis
I had an old Kenwood amplifier for years that had wire wrap board to board connectors; it worked great.
At VCFMW last month, my table was adjacent to Lorraine and her friends.
Ben Heck walked by during setup, and asked me what it was. I was clueless, so we started making educated guesses. The Amiga poster was a start.
I do wire-wrap. This thing is a marvel to behold. It is quite orderly, but could have used colors more effectively.
The three units implement the VLSI chips and the main board of the Amiga that was first shown at CES (I believe.)
Each VLSI is a stack of PCB such as you might get from Vector, with columns of pads for ICs in wire-wrap sockets, buss bars, and edge areas having mounting holes for connectors. The layers are connected by ribbon cables.
(they are not called breadboard!)
Wire wrap is a superior technology. There are no cold solder joints. They are gas-tight.
It is not hard to debug. If you follow some rules, and don't make a spaghetti bird's nest.
Such workmanship can be seen on minicomputers of the early 1970s.
Whole computers were made by wire-wrap around MSI chips. My wire-wrapped PDP-11/10 functioned perfectly thru the 1990s.
Recently, I implemented a microcomputer design in wire-wrap. That was enjoyable!
My design was captured in KiCad, laid out as a PCB, which I translated to perf-board and wire-wrap sockets
This approach is perfect for prototyping, as you can simply add new blocks.