For sub-50MHz digital applications, wire wrap is still my preferred method of prototyping, predominately influenced by my undergrad experience with this guy[1]...I'm fairly confident that he was the sole reason why the local RadioShacks in town kept a handsome stock of affordable wire wrap tools and 30AWG wire on the shelves year round.

I know certain defense performance specifications (e.g. [2]) explicitly prohibit the use of wire wrap in production hardware, although in this particularly case, the driving factor is largely based on maintainability considerations.

[1] https://www.ece.ufl.edu/users/gugel-karl [2] http://www.acq.osd.mil/ats/MIL-PRF-32070A.pdf

For years, wire wrap was preferred over soldering for aerospace hardware because there were no cold solder joints. NASA still has plenty of documentation on the matter.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wire+wrap+nasa&t=canonical

http://www.jameco.com/Jameco/workshop/techtip/wirewrap.html

I still have a wire wrap tool and a spool each of red and green wire.

That wire is still the nicest stuff for making small modifications to printed circuit boards, because it takes solder well, but the insulation doesn't melt.

My wire wrap tool is somewhere.

Yeah, on the PCBs manufactured in the '70s and '80s that I worked with in the '80s, I never saw anything but wire wrap wire used to make ECOs (Engineering Change Orders, I think that was a DEC phrase that had gone into general circulation).

This is stuff of nightmares at the start. I remember my first year doing my BEng. Discovered the wiring of the 32bit address bus was out by one. The wraps were on the bottom layer as well. This forced me to get my schematics right before starting the wiring wrapping. Plenty of other lesson learns as well.

As part of my degree 10 years ago we did wire wrapping to make a simple 68332 computer with serial terminals for I/O. The team I was on was weeks ahead of the others, until we were stuck by what turned out to be one wrong wire.

I think it was dropped from the course a few years later.

Holler. Our EE curriculum did the same thing (with an 8088). All the groups spent an lot of time with the logic analyzer detecting one-wrong-wire issues.

That was an incredibly valuable learning experience. I don't know if it's still taught that way, but I hope so.

Unfortunately, wire-wrap wire, tools, and (most importantly) sockets are expensive and difficult to come by these days.

Ebay is a great place right now for this stuff. Pennies on the dollar vs what you can get from Digikey.