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The term breadboard refers to the very old practice of putting circuits together literally on an old piece of wood, with brass wire brads or gizmos like Fahnestock clips to hold wire and make connections. For digital circuitry wire wrap pin sockets could be easily wired up and unwired as necessary.
I used to roll my own generic breadboard PCBs with standard IC foot print patterns back when so much of my designs used similar (8p-14-16p) dip IC packages. While lots of my old prototypes were full of discrete components tack soldered to other components in topsy-turvy 3 dimensional spider webs of wires and parts.
I find with my current design work the parts I want to use are too damn small to hand solder to (leads break off too easily and hard to see). I guess i could make some generic footprints adapters, but the packages vary too much. One recent part I am using has a heat sink pad on it's bottom. I have little choice but to make a dedicated PCB adapter for these oddball parts so it is not much more effort to make a first pass at a final design PCB.
If you are working with old school technology, old methods will still work. Lots of the new parts I want to use are only available in SMT.
JR
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