Vintage IBM boards (Patreon)

Ken brought some vintage IBM boards from the IBM 360 or 370 era. There is something very special about IBM boards of that period. IBM went its own way with packaging and PCBs, and developed what Fran Blanche calls an alternate electronics universe, where packages are silvery squares, and PCBs have all their holes drilled, they are all vias, and lines run only in one direction per side.

In the 360 era, IBM was far ahead in PCB manufacturing and chip packaging. The technology had been pushed forward by the Saturn V guidance computer development, the LVDC, and the formidable technology investment in the IBM 360 program. 

Originally, the square modules were not ICs. They were multi-chip ceramic hybrid modules, encasing a bunch of separate diodes and transistors and printed resistors. But they kept the same packaging format for the next generation of more traditional ICs in the 370 era, using mostly undocumented, IBM proprietary ICs, and eschewing the traditional DIL packages and series 74 TTLs that the rest of the world used. Same goes for their PCBs.

This results in these stunning, high density boards, where regularly arranged square packages nearly touch each other. It has a very unique esthetic, and still looks futuristic today.

Marc