PCBs afternoon

At first, I didn't plan to spend all the afternoon messing up with old electronics, but I found more work than I thought. There were some interesting stuff I want to show you.

I started opening an old portable TV-Radio-Cassette player. Nothing interesting until I saw the PCB. As an example, this is how a typical PCB looks like (upside down):

Source

The tracks are geometrically design and optimized by a computer. Now this is how mine looked like:

If you see the picture in full size, you'll realize of the tracks shapes. IT'S MAD!!! 

It wasn't the first time I faced one of those crazy boards, but I would say they are pretty uncommon, and I've never taken a picture of one.

Later, it was time for one of the first VHS players (I've been told the first one actually) that people of my place bought. Quite old stuff. The inside was very impressive:

To be honest, I got surprised. I really enjoyed that moment. I didn't hope this particular player was so complex! It had nothing to be with nowadays machines!

It took me hours to take it apart, but I found a lot of useful components like that big transformer (top left) with multiple outputs. As a curiosity, this piece (the player) is so old that there was NOT A SINGLE smd component in it! This is not even thinkable today.