In 1991, I was working in the Digital Equipment Corp. Alpha Workstations group, designing the memory for the first ever Alpha system, the DEC 3000 AXP.
This DIMM card I was responsible for was the first piece of hardware for the system we actually built, and the photo above is the real first one we ever manufactured, (hence the p001 label)
But it wasn't the first one I designed. My first version of this board was delivered from our PCB manufacturing site to our offices, and everyone came over to see it because they were all excited about having an actual piece of hardware created.
The excitement ended pretty quickly though when we discovered the pads for the memory chips were spaced incorrectly. My layout tech had used the wrong library for the board design, and I failed to catch it.
So the first piece of Alpha hardware was crap, and it was kinda my fault. Super embarrassing at the time. After that, I got into the habit of physically printing board design layouts onto mylar, then going up to our stockroom and requesting one of every component that would go on the board so I could physically put it on the printout and check it.
The stockroom guy probably thought I was weird. But I never screwed up another PCB layout again..
