PCB Design, ART?!?!?

[uniserver]

Maybe the fumes or the Lead/Tin solder is starting to effect me...

I'm in the middle of re-capping yet another Macintosh Portable Logic board right now.

It came to me last night about 4 in the morning when i was re-doing this LC-II board from GUAM, it had massive amounts of (Salty air) general corrosion...

Some of the pads where rotted off. I got it to work after using my heat new heat gun to re-flow some of those via's specifically the ones for the ADB port and the Video.

Anyways,

Art in the PCB Design?

or ART in the Populated PCB?

Was there more going on then just Basic utility? A to B?

I think yes.

 

[onlyonemac]

What are you getting at? What makes you say yes?

 

[uniserver]

art

/ärt/

Noun

The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture,...: "the art of the Renaissance"

Works produced by such skill and imagination.

Synonyms

craft - skill - artifice - science - workmanship - knack

I think it fits.

My point is, I wonder if a Engineer was considering, not only if the design was going to work, but what would it look like?

The issue is we will never know.

After all why would someone care about the populated pcb looks? Because it's inside the machine.

The logic board is the most important thing in a computer, with out it, All that is left is Case Design Appreciation (Art?)

 

[MacJunky]

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=PC_Board_Esthetics.txt

 

[uniserver]

awesome:

Steve responded strongly. "I'm gonna see it! I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it's inside the box. A great carpenter isn't going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody's going to see it."

 

[CelGen]

It wasn't really all that artistic in the days before you could have a computer route all the traces for you. If you were spending extra time routing traces and placing components in an artistic fashion you were being paid a pretty penny.

 

[olePigeon]

I think it depends on the company. Incidentally, have you seen the inside of a MacBook Pro? It is awesome. Black PCB with orange/yellow highlights. Even the grommets for the screws and the HDD bracket are the same orange/yellow color. They really go out of their way to make the inside look as nice as the outside. Very few companies do that.

It was only relatively recently that modern PC motherboard manufacturers started doing the same, but only because the market was driven by the hobbyist/modding community (who else!)

 

[James1095]

I definitely consider the appearance when I lay out a PCB. I will see it, and other engineers will see it, and I know that when I look inside a product, I can usually tell something about the engineering that went into it by looking at the PCB layout.

There is also the fact that layouts that look nice tend to work well too. A lot of it is likely the attention to detail that went into the design, but there are other aspects. Similarly, a great many of the best looking airplanes fly the best too.