Bodacious Wooden Breadboards – Hackster.io

It’s a funny old world when you come to think about it. I remember when I was a little lad listening to the old fogies prattling on about how hard things used to be and how much things had changed since they were young. I used to think they were exaggerating. As the years have passed, however, I’ve come to have a much greater understanding and appreciation of the information they were trying to convey.

Speaking about Yorkshire (we weren’t, but we are now), this is the biggest (and arguably the best) county in England. Have you ever seen the classic Four Yorkshiremen sketch by Monty Python? In this sketch, four well-dressed, successful men sit together, reminiscing about their harsh upbringings in Yorkshire. As the conversation unfolds, each man’s story becomes increasingly ridiculous and over-the-top as they compete to outdo each other in their tales of woe.

Perhaps the reason this sketch resonates with me so much is that I hail from Yorkshire myself. Much to my surprise, I find the friends of my youth have all grown old. Even worse, I’ve grown old myself (I didn’t see that coming). Now I’m the one who ends up waffling on about the days of yore. Happily, it’s much more interesting when I do it (at least, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it).

In these Thursday Throwback columns, I’m going to cogitate, ruminate, and reminisce about the things I’ve seen and the changes I’ve experienced as I’ve wended my way through life. Many of these topics will be technology-related, while others may meander off into the weeds to consider life writ large.

As a starting point, did you ever wonder why solderless breadboards are so-named? The “solderless” part makes sense because this type of breadboard allows us to connect electronic components without having to solder them together. But why do we say “breadboard”? Furthermore, thinking about things like printed circuit boards (PCBs), why is the term “board” used at all?

Let’s start with the use of “board” as a physical base or platform. Before modern solderless breadboards came along, electronics enthusiasts and professional engineers often used wooden boards as makeshift mounting surfaces. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon for young scamps like your humble narrator to repurpose the very wooden boards — called “breadboards” — upon which their mothers used to slice the family’s bread. And that’s the name that stuck.

In the early days, components such as vacuum tubes were mounted on these wooden boards via special sockets that were attached to the board by screws. Wires and other components like resistors and capacitors were attached to nails hammered into the board. Sometimes the wires and component leads were simply wrapped around the exposed parts of the nails; other times, they were soldered to the nails. Eventually, semiconductor transistors and diodes supplanted vacuum tubes, but the wooden breadboards stayed the same.

A common technique was to draw your schematic (circuit diagram) on a piece of paper, attach it to the wooden breadboard with paste or pins, and hammer small brass or copper nails in at each of the nodes (the points in the circuit where two or more circuit elements meet). Then you would wrap your wires and component leads around the nails to make the required connections.

I currently hang my hat in the USA. I was just FaceTiming with my friend Joe Farr, who is based in the UK (being able to hold intercontinental video chats on handheld phones is just one of the many things I could never have envisioned when I was young). Joe told me that when he started experimenting with 7400-series integrated circuits (ICs) in the 1970s, he used the “dead bug” approach to wiring them on wooden breadboards. When I inquired as to what he was talking about, he explained as follows.

First, he would hammer two rows of copper nails into his breadboard about 3” apart. Then he would string a pair of bare copper wires, wrapping the wires around each nail, and then soldering them to the nails. Next, he would take any ICs he needed for his experiment and press them down on his work surface, forcing their legs to splay out like dead bugs.

The next step was to connect the power and ground pins from the chips to Joe’s power and ground rails (the copper wires). In the case of 14-pin 7400-series devices, the ground (0V) connection was usually on pin 7, while the power (+5V) connection was usually on pin 14. After this, Joe would solder wires to the remaining pins and other components as required.

You may be tempted to think of wooden breadboards as being a fringe activity practiced by beginners who didn’t know any better, but you’d be wrong because this was pretty mainstream back in the day.

For example, Ladybird Books were popular when I was a kid. They actually started off in 1914, and they are still around today, but their heyday was from the 1940s to the 1980s. This imprint covered a wide range of topics, including Classic Stories and Fairy Tales, Nature and Animals, History and Historical Figures, Occupations and Everyday Life, Hobbies and Activities, and Science and How Things Work.

In the context of this column, I’m thinking of the 1979 Learnabout… Simple Electronics tome by Rev. George C. Dobbs. After showing you how to establish your breadboard, which featured brass screws and screwcup washers (a.k.a. “screw cups” or “cup washers”), this book walks the reader through a series of interesting transistor-based experiments, including a time delay switch, a Morse code oscillator, and an electronic organ.

Several people came up with interesting ideas to replace wooden breadboards. For example, I was just reading a blog on my friend Alan Winstanley’s website: Remembering the S-Dec Solderless Breadboard. This contains some very interesting images of early solderless breadboards, like the S-Dec.

Observe the holes, which are typically called “contacts,” “tie points,” or simply “holes.” Technically, each of these is a spring contact terminal housed within a hole in the breadboard’s plastic body.

S-Dec boards were big in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially in the UK. The funny thing is that Alan loved them, Joe hated them, and I never even heard of them at that time.

Observe that the holes in the S-Dec are too widely spaced to accommodate integrated circuits, which is a bit surprising when we remember that 7400-series devices were introduced by Texas Instruments (TI) in the mid-1960s.

The S-Dec was followed by the T-Dec. This had more pins and was slightly more helpful. Once again, however, the holes were spaced too far apart to accommodate integrated circuits. However, it was also possible to use small carrier boards — what I would think of as break-out boards (BOBs) — with an IC socket mounted on top to take signals from the IC and change the spacing to match the board.

Thankfully, in 1971, Ronald Portugal of E&L Instruments came up with the idea of a solderless breadboard with 0.1-inch (2.54 mm) spacings to match the legs on the IC packages of the day. It was Ronald’s board that was to become the basis for the modern solderless breadboards that are commonly used today.

There are several things I find interesting about all of this. First, the fact that Ronald’s solderless breadboards with their 0.1-inch hole spacing predated the S-Dec and T-Dec boards with their greater (and less useful) hole spacings. Also, many wooden breadboards (like the one on the cover of the book shown above) were themselves solderless.

Having said this, I can understand why people decided to call the modern versions “solderless breadboards” on the basis that “non-wooden breadboards,” although technically more accurate, doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

If you wish to learn more about today’s solderless breadboards, may I be so bold as to recommend my Arduinos and Solderless Breadboards column on my Cool Beans Blog?

Until next time, I welcome your captivating comments, querulous questions, and sagacious suggestions, which you can present on Hackster’s “Throwback Thursday” Discord channel. I look forward to seeing you there.