I’d differ with that opinion. Cast your eyes about your house and ask what doesn’t have a PCB?
Electronics seem to have superseded electro/mechanical devices even in the most inhospitable conditions.
That and designing PCB is more challenging than ever. Fine-pitch BGAs, tens of gigabit per lane high speed interfaces and small wifi/bluetooth antennas in everything. I guess PCB design in the 80s was simply more fun than it is now.
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If someone has there 10+ kid using KiCad they should talk to my kid to get her on this board. I can only wish. Though she does like to route boards for about five minutes until she gets board.
Me too, they taught it at my college (Orcad) until I pursuaded them to move to Ultimate/Ultiboard.
First used racal redac.
I designed with racal redac (around 1989) only one PCB. It was tester for our products. We used that tester till 2004.
I was (not easy) able to run racal redac (distribution on 4 x 360k floppies) at PC with 640k RAM and 2 floppy drives (no HDD!!). It was said that its schematic editor was worst then Orcad. I have written a simple program converting Orcad netlist to racal redac netlist and everyone around me were using it.
I started using redacted around early 80’s until mid 90’s when I left. Had no problems with schematic although I tried orcad the libraries were not as good and we had invested our time heavily in them, so no chance of moving. Ki cad is ok but lack of back annotation and schematic is clunky to change tracks is a bit naff. Still I only do small jobs as a hobby since retiring so not much of an issue for me.
I used Racal Visula in the 80s and 90s on Suns. I came across Redac much later. after Protel and Orcad
Another age-related poll:
- do you say NP0 instead of C0G?
- do you say 0.01uF or 10,000pF and never 10nF?
- do you sometimes say 60-cycle instead of 60-hertz?
- did you have spice graphs in asterisks on greenbar?
- ever drop your fortran program’s hollerith cards?
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And another:
Did you ever, on first sight of a SMPS, think, too many components, too complicated, never stand the test of time.
Some of those questions are actually regional. The the use of nF and Hertz was common in Europe long before the US.
Yeah, fair enough (I am in US). I still don’t think in nF though, and still not a fan of 3V3 or 5k1 and other newfangled terminology. But hey, I did move fully metric this year for pcb work. I do like mm better than mils now, so old dogs can learn new tricks. Well, I do still use inch versions of 0402, 0603… I recently got a reel that I thought was 0402 imperial, and it turned out to be 0402 metric – I think ant turds are larger.
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nF and Hz are standards for me since ‘always’. I build my first detector radio receiver in 1968 based on book published in 1953 and Hz were certainly there.
In 2014 I was very, very surprised reading one TI datasheet seeing there amplifier gain expressed in µMHOs (not sure about uppercase and lowercase) that I read as micro-Mega (so canceling each other) and then HOSes that I didn’t know what the hell it is.
Using Google I found that they use units that were replaced over 100 years ago by new one.
After me asking them why the use so old units in so new datasheet they replaced it with µS.
Wow. Old Geezers Rock!
Yessir! We do!
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Time to close after seven days.
Absolutely amazed that 136 individuals contributed a vote and surprised at the percentage of forum active “younger types” present.
Thank you to all. 
Your cat? Blah blah to get up to 20 characters.
It looks like I have to add something here, or else the forum thinks I did not write anything.
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