Tales From the Cube: Rush Project Troubleshooting Comes Down to the Wire

This episode, titled Rush-Project Troubleshooting Comes Down to the Wire, is included here not necessarily because the technical aspect of the story is exceptional, but because of the prank described in it. Wire-wrap board woes are all-too familiar to those of us who lived through them for prototyping in the 1970s and 1980s (before surface mount obsoleted DIPs). I personally built more than a hundred over the years. If you like waxing nostalgic over the era, read it anyway, but mainly read to learn a great gag to perpetrate upon a fellow engineer or technician. I rate it on par with rigging a length of Tyvek tubing stealthily into a chassis and having a cigarette smoker blow smoke through it from afar while someone is working on the circuit. Ah, those were the good old days!

Posted March 2013

RF Cafe began life in 1996 as "RF Tools" in an AOL screen name web space totaling 2 MB. Its primary purpose was to provide me with ready access to commonly needed formulas and reference material while performing my work as an RF system and circuit design engineer. The World Wide Web (Internet) was largely an unknown entity at the time and bandwidth was a scarce commodity. Dial-up modems blazed along at 14.4 kbps while tying up your telephone line, and a lady's voice announced "You've Got Mail" when a new message arrived...