1980s Vintage Solderless Breadboard

Here is a photograph of what is now a vintage breadboard that I used to have in the early 1980s when I was a young whippersnapper. This was sold a decade before that but it was such a great design that they kept making them for many years. I think it was a British company somewhere in Cheshire that made them.

Back then, the budding electronics hobbyist could have a wide range of breadboards to choose from and the u-DeC series was for integrated circuits (IC) projects. As you can see this one can accommodate two 16-pin chips, and most of the 74 series logic chips were in 16-pin PDIP packages. There was also the T-DeC series for the professional builder. Back then, there were some wonderful magazine publications showing how logic gates worked together with simple breadboard projects, therefore I had to buy this to try out some of the projects. This was all that I could afford back then, and it was expensive then as well!

These breadboards also came with a vertically slotting plastic panel with three circular cutouts for installing panel mount potentiometers and switches. The plastic panel slots in at the edges where you can see the six recesses. I had great fun using this breadboard, and remember building a bi-stable memory using two recycled transistors. I built many logic circuits using the 74 series logic ICs, stereo amplifier, stereo filter, alarm circuit and much more. For a 12 year old, it opens a doorway into another world.

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