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Construction

Well, I see that must hobbits have built compact CPUs housed in a single cabinet which also contains the Main Memory and even an IDE hard drive. I agree in that such is a convenient setup for the purpose but I'm putting an emphasis on the "old flavor" of my machine so I want it to look similar to those minis in the late 60's and early 70's... that is bulky!

I'm not planning for specific cabinets yet but most likely those will be sort of rack mount frames. Not just one but many of them. The whole thing will possibly compose a large piece the size of a refrigerator.

I think the large space will be justified because I'm not building just a CPU but the entire computer with different device controllers occupying separate units (enclosures). Moreover the storage (open-reel audio tape, VHS VCRs etc) will take a lot of space on its own.

I think she's going to be pretty and will have a nostalgic flavor. Actually, that is the idea.

Because the big ones are very expensive. That's the one reason, the other is modularity.

This will be, of course, an experimental machine meaning that I'll be adding functionality over time, so extensibility (adding instead of replacing) is important. The use of small boards forces a modular design from the beginning so extending existing circuits in the future can hopefully be done without braking the original design.

Good question. I don't think I have a good answer for it. As a matter of fact, I've never used wire-wrapping but I got to consider it and when I did, I found that wirewrap boards and IC sockets are really, really expensive...

For the other part, I'm very familiar with soldering components and wires on prototyping boards; honestly, to solder is something that I actually enjoy. The only bad thing about soldering is the enormous amount of time it takes to build a single circuit board.

Again, chosing soldering over wire-wrapping is not very convincing indeed but, personally, I don't feel particularly uncomfortable with that.