As many times as I've used breadboards, I wondered where the name came from. Thanks for sharing this! Wikipedia seems to agree and has a few example images.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadboard

Yup. That's why they're really called "solderless breadboards" although most people drop the "solderless" part.

When I was about 12 or so I had an electrical kit that used screws with caps to connect the wires and components. I don't remember what the substrate was, but it could very well have been wood.

A few years back, I re-wired the electrics in my guitar using a semi-complicated setup of a 6 way switch for pickups in-phase or out, and parallel or series, tone and volume pots, and distortion. There was also some choice to be made about what capacitors to use, and picking a diode for passive distortion.

After a first pass trying to just wire it directly, I ended up hot gluing a tiny breadboard into the compartment. That went much better and allowed me to swap candidate parts until it was right.

Whatever happened to wire wrapping?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_wrap

Just "too permanent" for rapid prototyping / playing around?

I still use it for hookups, though the days when whole computers would be built that way is long over.

The big problem is high speed signals.