Hi Martin
A few years back I documented the resurrection of my TRS-80 (Lev11 16K, yes, bow down and worship.....) and I found some of the interface boards I made for it and similar Z80 based machines running some form of BASIC.
At the time of the CPC464 mentioned above, I was probably around 19 or 20yrs old and had never heard of PCB layout / Circuit Simulation tools, and if they even existed back then would most certainly have been way out of my price range. If you took the back off of pretty much any consumer electronics at the time, traces looked at best hand drawn by a drunk on a trampoline...... which admittedly does sound a lot of fun.
An A4 notepad was my design tool to scribble things down and once I was reasonably satisfied that my logic was correct I would use a Staedtler A4 drawing board to tidy up my lines etc (still have that). Simulation was done by pencilling in a "1" or "0" at the data bus, following the trace and pencilling in the corresponding level there etc etc until you had gone through your logic chain and arrived at your output.
Vero boards were my weapon of choice as I had no way to produce PCBs. However the boards were only used to mount components. Wiring between pins was done by direct connection with wires routed "neatly" on the surface. Amazingly it was always correct first time...........
I probably still have my Antex 18W iron from then. Vero is unsuitable for "Mains", that was all off the "logic" boards.
Nowadays though the whole lot could be simply done using as you suggest TINA (other far more expensive methods are also available). Although in the "city" there was a specialised component store (Andrew Marshall I think) that could probably have sourced more complex chips, everything was built using either 74-series or 4000-series gates that Tandy stocked. AND/NAND/OR/XOR/NOR/J-K Flip-Flops etc were the bread and butter, not forgetting the ubiquitous Tri-State Buffer, essential for anything appearing on an Address / Data bus. Why wait for stock of a 4-input gates to arrive when I could use two 2-inputs and a spare gate on some other chip elsewhere on the board.......
Now I think on it, I also had an 8 x 8 grid, much like the 8x8 LEDs you get nowadays. Of course this was far greater in size and if I remember correctly I would send a byte, which was two nibbles, each bit of the nibble being the leg of a column / row. I would have had to have used full address decoding for this, as it would take up the entire 8-bit data bus leaving no room for other "Out" statements. For those interested the Out and In statements were available in Z80 machines and simplified interfacing. If you issued for example OUT,255 then all bits of the data bus would go high plus the "Out" line. To take an input you used IN,x and this would enable the "In" line, read the data bus and assign to variable "x". The Out / In pins enabled the Tr-State Buffers (and possibly other logic too). Made a huge difference to the logic required to interface.....
"Grrr..them youngsters nowadays don't know they're born......."
Regards
EDIT....
It was a long time ago...... Now I've thought on it, the Out/In used the lower 8-bits of the address bus plus the Out/In lines to give 256 addresses with access to the 8-bit data bus. My 8x8 grid would simply have been address 0000 0001 + OUT or similar. The OUT would have enabled Tri-State Buffers plus other logic.
