PCB was first written by Thomas Nau for an Atari ST in 1990 and ported to UNIX and X11 in 1994. Initially PCB was not intended to be a professional layout system but as a tool for individuals to do small-scale development of hardware.[1][3] The second release 1.2 introduced user menus. This made PCB easier to use and increased its popularity.[1] Harry Eaton took over PCB development beginning with Release 1.5, although he contributed some code from Release 1.4.3.

PCB includes a topological autorouter named Toporouter, developed by Anthony Blake in a Google-funded open source project mentored by DJ Delorie in 2008.[4] It is mostly based on an implementation of the algorithms described in Tal Dayan's 1997 PhD thesis, "Rubberband based topological router".[4][5] This router has meanwhile been adapted for use with the open-source KiCad project as well.