The Ware for August 2025 is shown below.

Thanks to Curtis Galloway for contributing this bit of nostalgia! This board has the look of one that was laid out by hand using masking tape or rubylith – back in the day before computers became affordable and powerful enough to regularly use them for making new computers. It also looks hand-soldered, instead of wave-soldered. I only ever designed a couple of boards using tape, but even today I’m still hand-soldering boards – BGAs, 0201’s and all. I do a lot less of it than I used to, but you still gotta fix bugs and hack things the old fashioned way.

The Ware for July 2025 is a Vernier Lab Pro. While researching the ware with FETguy, we noticed that the OEM for the product is probably Inventec, which also made a line of products for TI calculators at the time. That particular OEM design team applied its design language in several products. I’ll give the prize to Jin who got the exact make and model of the board. Congrats, email me for your prize!

The Ware for July 2025 is shown below:

Thanks to FETguy and Renew Computers in San Rafael, California for contributing this ware!

The Ware for June 2025 is a Gentner EFT-900A frequency shifter for radio audio applications. According to Chris Combs, “it lets two parties send and receive ‘full-range audio’, whatever that means, compressed and then decompressed via the usual 300-3500hz phone line”. Even though Per named the ware first, I will give the prize to Kienan because the response addresses the theory of operation of the ware – shifting the audio up/down by 250Hz so that low-end audio isn’t lost on analog telephone lines. I found that bit very insightful, and now I don’t look at the ware the same way as I did before. Congrats, email me for your prize!

Also, this has never happened before, but the designer of the ware (Bill Gillman) made a cameo in the comment sections. I really enjoyed looking at the board, so as a token of thanks for designing such a nice ware, email me and I’ll also give you a prize.

The ware for June 2025 is shown below.

A big thanks to Chris Combs for this handsome contribution! Despite being 80’s vintage, the board is in mint condition.