Speculation…

The numbering is strange, 47-24 on one board and 24-47 on the other. That might make sense if the boards are designed to be set up facing each other with something in between, or perhaps pushed through both to make connections.

Intriquing.

Ive seen enough info to assume that its definitly an old way to program or wire instruments to test. Its also very clear that its not compleat. Something has been stripped off of it through the years, prob for scrap. The fact that no one can identify it yet leads me to believe it was from a closed, proprietary system that maybe only a few people had access to. It seemed like a popular system back in the day so its not hard to imagine.

Arrgggg, I (think I) have identified it. It’s just my 2nd of 3 postings is “awaiting moderation”. Probably because I put in links to the picture & web page.

(I think) You stick jumpers into the board and shove it into a card sorter and let the sorter “sort things out”.

Most (OK, all) of the “wire programming” boards I have seen have metal frames.

As h3po pointed out, this seems like the base for an electronics kit. I wanted one as a kid. It had blocks about the size of the squares in the pic. Each box had a transistor, resistor or other component. One would stick the blocks on the board and make circuits. The tops of the blocks were the schematic symbols, so looking at the circuit one could see the schematic. Way cool.

It’s peg board. Used for electronics prototyping. The parts came in little holders with feet. The board held the parts and then you used jumper wires to wire it all together

It’s obviously the prototype for super-battleship
a game before its time.

Oh hell’s bells, I saw these on missile test benches 15 years ago… and the name is… ? When I saw them, they were mounted in beefy aluminum frames with handles, and were used as logic patch panels. They were old tech even then, along with the PDP-11s only then being phased out as test equipment controllers (with PCI bus-based emulator cards… cheaper and more reliable than trying to port test s/w written in PDP assembler).

Plugboard.
Can’t remember exactly what machine its for (Not IBM) but had several of these after disassembling some old computers (tabulators) in the late 70′s. The gold pins & connectors, and and the frames were worth cash so were remove. The plastic (and some Bakelite) were not worth anything for scrap.

Some other examples

http://raggio5.smugmug.com/History/Computer/1264392_kx5UQ/1/59860092_VVqbc#59860092_VVqbc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulating_machine
http://www.suomentietokonemuseo.fi/vanhat/eng/kytken_eng.htm

The secondary school in my neighborhood had an open-door today. I visited the school and in the science classroom I saw a similar ‘oversized breadboard’ which was used to demonstrated electronic circuits. Speaking of coincidence…
They had plugs which contained a lamp, a volt meter, ampere meter etc, and which plugged into the board. For demonstration purposes they had made a parallel and serial circuit.

On the website, they conclude it’s probably a breadboard for fiber optics. After searching for fiber optic breadboards, I get pretty similar boards with evenly spaced holes, although all of the ones I find are flat black, rather than checkerboard.

Here’s a bunch, for comparison: http://www.assetrelay.com/categories/Mechanical-Positioning/Optical-Tables-and-Breadboards/

These are `plugboards’. The are made of plastic about a half inch thick, and in my experience, they are used in a metal frame that has handles.

In use, a metal pin is crimped on the end of a wire, and pushed into a hole. Another pin is crimped onto the other end of the wire and pushed into another hole. A number of wires inserted into the holes make up a `program’. The black and white printed pattern are to make it easier to locate the intended holes.

The pins are equipped with `barbs’ to hold them in place, but allow a little play and rotation, and still be removable. Each pin extended a small distance below the bottom of the board, and was tapered to a centered 1/16 diameter cylinder. The pins I am familiar with were `formed’, not screw-machined. I think the whole `system’ was from A-MP, now part of Tyco.

The entire board in its frame was plugged and latched into a large `socket’ frame. The latch mechanism was made so it pushed the plugboard sideways a small distance so the pins would engage the mating pins in the `socket’. In other words, it was a large `zero insertion force’ socket for up to many hundreds or thousands of of pins. The pins in the `socket’ frame were similar to the `plugboard’, but terminated in a flat tab, and the holes in the `socket were shaped to prevent rotation hand hold them at a 45 degree angle relative to the side of the frame, so that the sideways motion of the `plugboard’ at the last stage of latching would cause the round pin tips of the plugboard’ to engage the flat tabs of the `socket with a wiping motion.

I have seen similar, but much larger plugboards than yours used on UNIVAC card readers and sorters.

A set of twelve `plugboards and sockets were used on a Burroughs version of a ZIP-code reader for the post office. In this case, the plugboard pins were interconnected with resistors in the wires to serve as the `weighting values’ used with op-amps for recognizing the digits of a scanned ZIP-code. There was a plugboard for each digit and space, eleven plugboards total (and a spare). The character recognition `method’ was that of C. K. Chow, an engineer at Burroughs.

It’s a zero gravity chessboard! Pieces stick through the holes using four pins so they don’t move.
/jk

The numbering suggests that this was not part of a learning set and is definitely not a breadboard either. You would have numbers for rows and letters for columns. The fact that the number starts at 24 for one of the sides suggests that there is a part that numbers 1-24 that is missing. Injection molding limits the age of the part. It has no mounting holes although the checkered holes could be used for that purpose. They cannot be optical boards because those are made of heavy/stiff material to eliminate vibrations. The checkered pattern has a very generic significance. It is the pattern you would give when both the X and Y axis are equally important to alignment, otherwise you go with stripes of alternating colors. Their argument for an optical fiber patching board also makes no sense since you would still need something to hold the fibers in place. The holes have no retaining features on the inside. I think this is a structural component meant to align, mount, isolate, and insulate other components. Obviously in a system that uses high voltage. Maybe in a high voltage laboratory, this is a tool to test out arrangements.

Back in the mid-60s to early 70s (I’ve gotten over being an old guy; you will too.), panels similar to this were used in a lot of devices. I used a similar panel to control the behavior of an IBM 029 keypunch. It was sort of like building a batch file. That panel was tan and had a metal frame, latches, etc.

We used to have these boards on the bottom of test heads used for an in-circuit testing. RobS description is right on the money. Metal pins through the peg board are wire wrapped and connect to spring loaded test point pins on the top side of the test head. A circuit board is placed on the test head, vacuum applied, and the board is sucked down to begin testing. Checker board can be seen here for the HP3065 http://www.pmg-prueftechnik.de/hpengl.htm

Its obvious its a Russian chess/ Chinese checker board with the option to use special colored 4/4 point dominoes in which one end is black and one end is white all the while a learning tool for multiplication table but only in increments of four. Duh!!!

Welcome,

I don’t see bottom, if there is no electronic parts than i think that is made for creating “wires”

In 1970 years, some connections was not made by PCB but by wires.
In holes you stick small pins (using special template, to put stick in corect holes) and move that wires between stick. So every wire have correct length and direction. When you put all for example 50 wires, you tie them together using rope (i don’t know how to say small piece of rope)

Look here how that small colorfull wires look.

http://www.fonar.com.pl/audio/fotki/tester_p507/rys5.jpg

Regards from poland

I believe this is a visual systems calibration board. Microsoft surface uses something similar to this to calibrate the microsoft surface. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee692052(Surface.10).aspx I work on 3M Lava systems and they calibrate the scanners with a small block that lookes like the checkerboard above. What machine this was used to calibrate I cant say but I bet it was a scanner/camera system used to track motion or scan 3d

It looks like a punchboard to me.

Popular in the 50s-80s, a wooden peg was punched through a hole (for a standard fee, a nickle to a dollar) which contained a rolled-up paper, it had a winning cash amount, free punch, advance to jackpot (if there was one) or prize – or nothing.

Often “maps” were produced for them so the sellers knew which holes paid out which prizes. This funded the Milwaukee mafia (Balistrieris) and the Milwaukee Jewish mob, who ran punchboards from Michigan U.P. to Kentucky in every mom-and-pop store and gas station for years.

I can’t say what it is, but I can say that this is NOT an optical breadboard (for laser or fiber optics experiments). Those are usually made of honeycomb aluminum or granite and have threaded holes.