While wiring up the ALU, I was becoming frustrated with all the wires. Trying to keep things looking neat became more and more difficult and I couldn't help thinking that the green wire I was using felt thicker than some of the other wire I had used on this project. I'm not particularly happy with the final result, but it is as neat as I could get it and it was very difficult to get all the wires to lay neat and fit into the available space.

When I started wiring up the computer, I had originally used some purple wire that I found very difficult to work with - the wire kept snapping and the outer coating was quite difficult to strip. I switched to using a new spool of green coated wire that was a bit easier to work with, but still needed a bit extra effort to strip the ends. Having almost used up that spool of wire, I ordered some more and have been working on some other projects the past few days. I grabbed a different spool of wire for another project and found it much easier to work with - stripping the wire was so much easier and I was able to lay multiple wires next to each other easier too. Comparing the green wire with this other spool (brown) I could see that the plastic coating is a lot thinner on the brown wire, which makes routing multiple wires easier.

It might not show up so well in these pictures, but the brown wire easily fits two wires per row of breadboard holes whereas the green wire is a very tight fit. There is actually a slight amount of play between the brown wires which simply isn't present with the green...

I think I will switch over to this other brand, but that will also mean a colour change - for some reason I can't find green or blue spools of this wire unless I buy a six pack of different colours - I have enough black, red, white and yellow wire to last me, but they don't sell blue or green individually. I can get brown and grey spools, so I guess I will have to replace the green with brown. (I think the grey might be too easily confused with the white I am using for the clock signals and yellow is used for control signals.) I'll leave the ALU for now, but it will need to be rewired with the new wire at some stage...