When I was in school, I had access to a pretty decent hobbyist level PCB fab setup. No plated holes or silk screen or solder mask or anything like that, just a good camera, fresh chemicals, and a commercial etching tank. I had this idea that someone (me) should make some PCBs laid out just like those solderless bread boards we used in the lab. That way, using a "generic" circuit board, you could solder in the chips, solder in the wires, and end up with a fairly usable permanent board for a project.

So to demonstrate my brilliant idea, I laid out the artwork, etched up a couple of boards, and built this logic analyzer I had been wanting to build. Fortunately, the design kind of naturally split into two mostly independent sections: one board held the clock generators and pre-trigger counters, and the other had the RAM, address counters, and trigger logic. Unfortunately, the finished product looked at least as messy as if I had built it up on real proto boards. The boards didn't hold much logic, considering their size, and I'm sure the noise levels were horrendous. But, it worked, so I put it in a case and kept using it.

The original circuit was designed to interface to some parallel ports on an S-100 board I had designed as my "final project" in school. The S-100 system in question had no real operating system, but it did have the wire wrapped, single plane (monochrome) prototype for what was later to become the Graphics Subsystem. This made for some pretty nice looking "logic analysis" screens, although I had no way to print them out.

Later, I toyed with adding a D-Bus interface so I could tie it into my CP/M systems, but eventually, I settled on dropping in an 8751 and a MAX232 so it would talk to anything with a serial port. I actually made pretty heavy use of the analyzer during development of the Closed Caption Decoder; I think I still have some of the printouts.