[myself248]

IMHO, breadboards should come with warnings, to the effect of:

* Keep this thing pristine. Dust, corrosion, liquid, or any other indignity will invisibly poison the breadboard and take its toll on your sanity later.

* Use only DIP legs and 22-24 gauge wire. Shoving a TO220 into these spring clips will spread them and take its toll on your sanity later.

* Decouple, decouple, decouple. The distributed inductance of a breadboard is nontrivial and if you're not putting a nanofarad next to every logic chip, you will summon ghosts.

* Buying cheap breadboards with subpar contact plating will yield exactly the sort of performance you'd imagine. Breadboards are supposed to be an EASY way to build circuits, not a CHEAP way. You get what you pay for.

With all these things in mind, they're quite good at what they do.

[m0xte]

Problem is there is no ground plane so you do get absolutely horrible signal integrity whatever you do including decoupling. Refer to AN47-26: https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/appl...

(digital circuits are fast analogue ones!)

[analog31]

Something I've learned is that modern CMOS logic is a lot more forgiving than TTL for breadboarding, thanks to low power consumption and push pull outputs. So if you're thinking of b'boarding a classic circuit like a minicomputer, allow yourself one concession to modernity, namely using something like 74HC logic instead of 74LS.

[m0xte]

I have to agree there. 74hc is surprisingly robust!