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Sunday, 01 June 2014

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I used to work at a large minicomputer company located in Maynard. We did the same thing once.

The prototype board came back with a mirror image of the pin numbering, so we had to build a batch of special adapter sockets where the chip was glued on upside down and all of the pins had tiny wires on them that connected to the right pin.

Ah, the infamous mirror-imaged chip!
At least with DIPs, you could just install them from the solder side of the board. I take it yours wasn't a DIP.
I recall a couple of Fun Projects like that: one had socketed PLCCs, with goofed-up footprints such that the chips had to be installed in very tall kludged sockets with (if memory serves) swapping of inner & outer rows.
Then there was the through-hole board that came back from fab (and getting boards fabbed was a slow and expensive process in those days!) with the copper layers swapped. We cried. Then we laughed, as we realized that we could just install the components from the wrong side. Then we cried again when we remembered that it had a dual-readout edge connector, and we'd have to swap all the connections to it.

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