The decline of HeathKit and also the decline of anything related to blue-collar as "low status".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit
99% of modern Americans can't do anything for themselves.
Ask HN: Did students lose interest in electronics as a hobby in the early 80s?
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: Ask HN: Did students lose interest in electronics as a hobby in the early 80s?
#22viam.com has the potential to re-ignite that passion for this generation.
This appears to be yet another company trying to monetize the robotics education space. What they offer seems shallow to me.
Re: Ask HN: Did students lose interest in electronics as a hobby in the early 80s?
#23I think it was more that radio shack stopped carrying hobby books and electronics parts for the most part after the 90s.
Re: Ask HN: Did students lose interest in electronics as a hobby in the early 80s?
#24Electronics as a hobby costs real money. Software as a hobby costs nothing --- beyond a computer which everyone already has; hobbyist or not.
Computers were not cheap in the 80s. However, my father, who did a lot of electronics projects in the 80s did pivot to computers and it changed my life.
I remember going to the independent computer stores of Silicon Valley. There were many enterprising Asian rim immigrant merchants selling components from jewelry display cases.
For hardware, there was WeirdStuff (large bin of SPA shareware on dot-matrix print labeled floppies), Halted/HSC (used and new electronic parts and odds-and-end), JDR microdevices (when commercial engineers needed real tools and parts), and Radio ("Rat") Shack.
Retail software: the original Fry's Electronics branched out, NCA Peripherals, and Egghead Software. Later, the CompUSA tech hypermart came along and squished most of the independent stores and regional chains. Micro Center was one that endured. PixelUSA in Campbell always had the latest in prosumer DIY computer gear. Central Computer Systems (CSS) is less of cramped computer parts hypermart that is more of a convenience store; they also had almost every free and paid computer magazine and semi-commercial open source media distributions from Slackware to Red Hat (pre-Enterprise) Linux.
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Electronics. My dad was an electrical and A/C mechanic who got started with HeathKit with his father, who was also a mechanic.
My dad was too impatient and not interested in teamwork or doing things together.
From a young age, I knew generally the fundamentals of how passives (RLC), current, voltage, motors, and safety around electricity. I had the gray plastic front Science Fair 200-in-1 kit.
Re: Ask HN: Did students lose interest in electronics as a hobby in the early 80s?
#25We made abstractions successfully, world changing abstractions. Do the NAND to Tetris course and see that tech is abstractions on top of abstractions. Electronics today is frequently represented by code. Check out Verilog or VHDL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_description_language Where electronics stayed interesting is in the realm where code meets reality -> robotics and art. Playing with LED's, robotics c…
In university, we used individual macro components in Altera's tools (ModelSim/Quartus) to construct a microcoded, superscalar, pipelined CPU with branch prediction. It was way more painful than Verilog but had a "visual programming" UX to it.
For a complete processor emulating the real world, there's OpenSPARC.
https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t2-pag...
I'm sure there are dozens of open core RISC-V implementations out there and maybe some ARM ones too.
Re: Ask HN: Did students lose interest in electronics as a hobby in the early 80s?
#26I am from the 70s and my father did both electronics and software so I was raised with both. I think it really collapsed in the 90s but end 80s my university dropped many analog electronics courses for digital. That was enough to have new students not learn enough about electronics.
That's a shame in real terms of losses of future EEs, technicians, and hobbyists.
For countries worrying about remaining independent and competitive, there's too much of a monoculture and brain trust in too few locations: Taiwan, Huaqiangbei, Vietnam, and Malaysia. There ought to be every effort made to make electronics cool, accessible, and useful. 3D printing I think has helped carry this torch along some.
In other news, commercial electricians make comfortable middle-class salaries and are unlikely to be immediately threatened by automation.
Re: Ask HN: Did students lose interest in electronics as a hobby in the early 80s?
#27I did when I got an Apple ][+. Barely picked up my soldering iron again.
Re: Ask HN: Did students lose interest in electronics as a hobby in the early 80s?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this question is specifically about the early 80's, although I think that argument is certainly relevant today.
Computers like Commodore 64 or Sinclair Spectrum were relatively affordable and available in the 80's. They disappeared in the early 90's (replaced by PC compatibles), that answer is only a few years off.
The TRS ("trash") 80 also.
Shout out to the Amiga: expensive, different, and interesting. Apple and Mac classic were 2 of those things.
Re: Ask HN: Did students lose interest in electronics as a hobby in the early 80s?
#29I think it was more that radio shack stopped carrying hobby books and electronics parts for the most part after the 90s.
The people that are best with equations and problem-solving were always the ones who did the electronics, whether hobbyist or professional. Computers, too but mainframes were too big to own your own and do whatever you wanted to with it. So no computer hobbyists until computers became personal, and not that many until affordable, then no surge until surplus was available.
Electronic hobbyists did not surge until surplus components became abundantly available after WWII themselves.
There's always only been so many of these enthusiasts.
Once Ataris and Commodores got popular mainly for gaming, I watched the promising young geeks and nerds who would have gravitated to natural science fields choose computers instead.
In the early '80's it was easy to forsee this eventuality so I doubled down on natural science myself.
Electronic hobbyists who build from components didn't dwindle to insignificance because Radio Shacks all over the US closed down, Radio Shack closed because there were not enough hobbyists coming along any more.