You know those tech chips (which might not even be chips, but to my uneducated eye look like chips).
In: Technology
Because it’s way easier to manufacture this way, and therefore nearly all modern parts are designed to be put on printed circuit boards.
That wasn’t always the case, up to the 1950s point-to-point wiring was common.
It looked like this:
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Motorolagoldenviewchassis.jpg#mw-jump-to-license
This is basically impossible to automate, and was done on long assembly lines by (typically) women. In those times, labor was cheap and parts were expensive, so this was economically viable. It was prone to faults though, it’s not uncommon at all for collectors of vintage gear to find connections not ever been soldered. They just barely had contact to work on the testing station.
Then came printed circuit boards. The start out as a copper-clad board and all the copper not needed for connections is etched away in a quite complicated process, which I will not explain here.
They started to be used in 1930s, but really became mainstream in the early 1960s. The early board were still populated (parts were stuck through holes) by hand, but already soldered automatically by moving them over a bath with molten solder (wave soldering, still in use today).
From the 1980s onwards, even the placement of components was done by robots and then the whole board is put in a special oven to melt the soldering paste which was put on before the parts. You get a finished board in minutes, with a precision not possible by hand.
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