Truline Corporation was a manufacturer of printed wiring boards in Visalia, California. People tend to call them printed circuit boards but technically they are mostly all printed wiring boards. They are wires, and rarely are they in a pattern that affects the electrical operation of the circuit. Anyway….
I started working there in the spring of 1980, in the drilling department. I spent several years in copper electroplating and eventually worked my way up to “engineer”. That job involved taking the customer’s blueprint and artwork and creating a Work Order (W.O.) that the factory used to build the order. But I’m jumping ahead.
At Truline, I’d started out as a driller. We’d take the artwork, tape it to a flatbed, and then guide a table riding on dual rails (an XY table) over the artwork. The table held four small electric drills, one on each corner. Where there was a pad on the artwork, I’d align the scope (an angled mirror) and tap the foot pedal. The foot pedal would engage pneumatic locks on the rails, and drop the spinning drills into the PCB material. We’d stack the copper-clad PCB fiberglass four stacks high. With one foot tap, I would drill sixteen circuit boards.
Later, I ran the “programmer” which still used a flatbed and taped artwork, but had finger spinners. As I spun them, the XY table moved, this time floating on air bearings and driven by dual leadscrews. Instead of physically drilling the holes, it put the X Y coordinates on a paper tape. This was G-Code, although I didn’t really do any language work (yet). Once in a great while, I tapped the foot pedal an extra time, and then had to go back and manually slice the errant code out of the paper tape (and then glue the tape back into a continuous strip). Man I don’t know why so much of my early (electronic) computer programming recorded the data on punched paper. The paper tapes were stored in clear plastic boxes that looked like movie canisters. When it came time to drill the panels, I (or someone else) would load the paper tape into an Excellon Automation drill and drill the panels complete with automated bit changes and robotic speed.
Later I was on the router / profiler machine, and with it I actually did write G-Code to move the router bit around to carve the circuit board out of the panel. It was very much like programming an ink pen-plotter – we had one in the engineering department at the junior college, which I’d gotten to put a plot on, using FORTRAN. Programming the G-Code to run the router bit around the panel, cutting the individual boards out, was fun. Every once in a while, we’d get one with unusual curves or cutouts.
Later I ended up as the “Engineer” at Truline and started composing Work Orders. All the W.O.s were a photocopied piece of paper, and I crossed out the parts that we didn’t need. I wrote in numbers or text where the build needed things specified. The first line, I think, was (for example) “2 x 8” for a panel two circuit boards wide and eight tall. Later, when IBM had standardized the physical dimensions for ISA add-in cards, we did a lot of “1 x 8” panels.