William K. Borsum, P.E. of OEM Dataloggers and Instrumentation Systems says:

Enter Bicc-Vero Elelctronics with a system they call Stitch wiring. You buy protoboard with 62 mil holes on 100 mil centers (Mouser, radio shack), and a reel of their sockets. One socket, one contact. So for a 8-pin dip part you would insert 8 of the little sockets into the perf-board in the correct pattern. 2 on 400 mil centers for a resistor, etc. Parts plugged into a standard machined socket on one side of the board--and (here is the really neat part) the back was an insulation displacement style connector for wire wrap wire. Special tool staked the wire into the back of the socket, and you could daisy-chain memory busses across the whole board. All you needed was a good wire list and parts layout. Once did a Multi-buss-II board about a foot square with some 2000+ pins in less that 6 hours. No errors either--the system is self correcting.

Kicker is you have to buy reels of the things, and they have gotten very expensive in the US--$250 or so for 1000 pieces. Although this is comparable to the cost of good IC sockets, it is still twice the selling price of a few years ago.