It was definitely an interesting time. That said, the summer of '78 I was renting a room from an IBM engineer who had bought a Heathkit H-11 and was using it to trade stocks. They would enter the prices from the Wall Street Journal every day of the stocks they were interested it, and then run their "algorithm" over them and it would spit out "weights" for buying or selling various stocks. They could then call their broker and have them execute a trade.
As part of my 'rent' I could help out by entering numbers or verifying numbers for him. I discovered that his portfolio was worth more than $4M and I asked him why he was working at IBM if he was "rich". His answer was that he enjoyed working at IBM, you could just "spend" stock as you would lose out on future growth, and what would he do with his time if he wasn't working? The one conceit he admitted was that his house was paid for so he didn't have to pay a mortgage and that meant he had more disposable income every month.
That was a pretty amazing for me at that age.
The other random factoid was that for 10 years I was President of the "Home Brew Robotics Club" (which is still going on) and it was a direct outgrowth of the Home Brew Computer Club. It was started by Dick Prather as a "SIG" or Special Interest Group where HBCC members who were interested in using their computers with robots would meet and exchange ideas and such.
what would he do with his time if he wasn't working?
In a world so full of interesting, wonderful and curious things, I will never understand people who can't think of anything to do if they didn't have a job. Money is usually a limiting factor, but it sounds like it might not have been for this person.
While the "hobby computer club culture" is known for introducing Steve Jobs to Woz, I suspect it enabled many thousands of similar life and industry changing personal collisions. It certainly did for me. In 1982 my teenage self started a local computer club for my 4K 8-bit Radio Shack Color Computer which I promoted by printing up flyers and driving around to a dozen Radio Shack stores and convincing the managers to post them near the computer. The first meeting was at my house with a dozen or so people but quickly outgrew that and moved to a local community center. I mostly started it because there was a lack of information that was specific to the computer I owned except for two hobby-level monthly 'zines (only available by subscription) and I didn't have any computer knowledge myself (or know anyone with a computer).
Fortunately, a fair number of people who came to the club knew more than I did about our computer and computers in general. I acquired much of my early computer knowledge from those people as well as getting my first two programming jobs through club contacts despite having no resume or computer-specific education. Eventually the club grew to several hundred people, became a registered non-profit corporation and had a volunteer board of directors (who were all older and more experienced than I was about, well - almost everything). I describe myself as a "self-taught programmer" but a good part of that was also being informally 'club-taught' because I had people to ask when I got stuck. They may not have always had the answer but hearing how they thought through solving it was also an education.
I can trace back my entire life-long career as an (eventually) successful serial entrepreneur in desktop computer-centric software and hardware to that club I naively started 45 years ago - and I still have five close friends I met at the club despite all of us moving across the country and around the world several times. And each of those friends has gone on to have notably interesting and productive computer-related careers too.
This happened a couple decades later, but my first FOUR tech jobs came from attending a local Linux user group and networking with the people there.
I was talking to someone and explaining that I was taking classes at a local community college in preparation for computer science degree and mentioned off-hand that I might try to find some part-time Linux/BSD sysadmin work at some point. (I never fully attained the degree but also ended up not needing it.) The owner of a local IT consulting business overheard me and called me up the next day. I worked for him for a while and the next three jobs I moved to after that were all based on referrals and recommendations from people in that group.
I am also a Radio Shack Color Computer alumni, owe my career to it. I started using OS-9 as soon as I could afford to upgrade to 64K RAM, to which I thank feeling right at home with SunOS after I got access to that in the university.
To anyone unfamiliar, which is probably most people, OS-9 was a multi-user multi-tasking operating system which ran on 6809 CPUs. While not a UNIX, it was similar enough that the transition to SunOS was smooth.
To this day, I still alias "ls -la" to "dire", which comes from my muscle memory of typing "dir -e" in OS-9!
I have been thinking about this recently. The people building those hobby computers at the time were spending huge amounts of money on building devices that were arguably not useful at all for anything practical. It was pure exploration of new ideas.
I have a feeling that we live in times of over-commercialization. Today, if you build something, the first criticism you'll hear is, "I can get something cheaper that is mass-produced in China." The second thing you'll hear is, "How do you monetize this?".
I think this puts a huge damper on innovation, especially among hobbyists.
You touch on two interesting, intertwined topics that don't seem connected at first, but they just connected for me.
I'm not sure it's all necessarily about over-commercialization, but it might be over-globalization.
We're obviously going through a timeline of the US trying to roll back globalized supply chains, and we don't know how that will end, but the one benefit it gave Americans cheap stuff at a cost of that production happening in the US. The benefit of cheap stuff will slowly be eradicated in the name of providing more job security in the US (at least, that's the plan - many are not convinced it makes much economic sense).
Everyone has benefited in some way from globalization (cheaper stuff means more economic utility), but we've also faced economic peril: off-shoring work means there is less work available near by. This is obviously true of blue collar work, but I think most people in the tech industry are familiar with Indian, Eastern European and Philippine companies taking work too.
In most of the West, there seems to have been an assumption that the West would become dominated by "knowledge workers" - all work would move to white collar professional office-bound, screen-based work - while the dirty and hard work of turning base materials into useful products, the blue collar stuff, would move off-shore. Within white collar work, the West would become more "managerial", more strategic, less productive in a tactical sense.
This idea isn't entirely new. Slavery and multiple empires were predicated on similar ideas, and while off-shoring isn't exactly modern slavery, the idea of paying poor people very little money so we can benefit does feel philosophically aligned, shall we say.
It's left us in a place where most people - both in the West and in those countries with off-shored work, and at very work layer from the hardest manual labour all the way up to managerial, perhaps even executive, levels - are worried about their economic future.
How can you have time for hobbies when you're worried about surviving the next 5 years?
This means people are now, more than ever, looking for things that raise their own utility - can I earn more money, and can I buy things cheaper? If you're doing something that doesn't move the needle on one or both of those sides of the equation, you start to feel like you're being left behind and the World is going to eat your lunch, and maybe you and your family too.
In that context, there's not much space for hobbies. Hobbies were a luxury only the affluent could afford hundreds of years ago and as wealth inequality rises again after decades of historic lows, the anxiety is starting to chip away through the middle classes and into the working classes again, so that hobbies won't exist again for many people over the next 20 or 30 years.
And yes, it does harm innovation. Most scientific and technological advancements of the last 500 years were started by people having the time to muck about with things, either as a hobby or as a paid vocation in a research lab or academic setting. That's potentially going away bit by bit. Curiosity has limited value in the future, as it becomes an extravagance few have time or resource for. Many people are subconsciously or even consciously asking themselves: if something doesn't lower a price on things I'm buying or increase the money I can get for what I'm selling, and it can't do that now, why do I care?
Here's a fun fact: in the photo of the Byte Shop, the person in the window with their back to the camera is John Draper, the legendary hacker known as Captain Crunch.
The first buyers of Altair could not find it in any shop. Every transaction occurred via a check sent to MITS, sight unseen, in the hopes of receiving a computer in exchange.
I remember looking at lots of the add in the back of all the magazines and comic books (and paperbacks) being amazed at all the stuff on offer. Just send a check or money order and get you own ...
Then in the 1990's with internet commerce getting started I remember a lot of skepticism with comments like "who would send money to someone they have never met".
No drawing any conclusions here, just looking back and seeing similarities and changes.
I remember the big 1977-1979 scam with DataSync, World Power Systems, and "Colonel David Winthrop" advertising S-100 boards and other computer stuff but not shipping it to purchasers while also ripping off his suppliers. The article mentions Colonel Whitney (not Winthrop) for some reason
That quote bugs me a little because it presumes that mail order hadn't existed before then, that it was some sort of "act of faith." Sears was selling whole ass houses via the mail in the early 1900's, that's where the term "Craftsman home" came from; it's literally the then-owned-by-Sears brand.
The difference here is that orders placed by USPS mail were subject to mail fraud regulations _and enforcement_ --- that was _not_ in place for early internet ordering.
My kids were quite amazed when they found my copy of a book whose approximate title was _Specialty Mail Order Catalogs_, which is apparently so obscure I'm not finding it on Goodreads or Abebooks --- will have to check the ISBN the next time it comes up and add it to the former.
Once upon a time I actually bought (and sold!) stuff on ebay (or rather, auctionweb, at ebay.com/aw, the auctions were only a part of the site!) with postal money orders. After all, a fraudster would be caught out by bad feedback! The internet felt a lot cozier then.
In the mid 90's I sent about $200 in money order to Nigeria to buy a bunch of cassette tapes from some random internet person and what would you know? 2 months later, I had 50 tapes at my doorstep.
I’ve always been really loved the bicycles for the mind metaphor and for a while I was cataloging different ways the metaphor works for me. Not sure what I did with that list, but compiling it was fun and made me think about how I chose to use technology.
It feels like the era of the personal computer ended around the turn of the century though.
As a person who has finally arrived at a programming setup which allows him to finally do what he has dreamed about since first trying to sketch things up on a Koala Pad attached to a Commodore 64, I would like to gainsay that the personal computer revolution has come to an end.
When OpenSCAD was first released, I finally had a 3D modeling environment which made sense to me.
When the Shapeoko was first announced on Kickstarter (which made use of the opensource projects Arduino, Grbl, and Makerslide, and was iself initially opensource) I finally had a robotic shop assistant which allowed me to make pretty much anything I wanted w/o the need to make myriad fixtures and jigs or to limit myself to traditional joinery techniques.
When Python was added to OpenSCAD as: https://pythonscad.org/ I finally had a programming environment which allowed not just 3D modeling but also mutable variables _and_ the ability to write out files so as to make DXFs or G-code.
and have been using it for my personal projects for a while now --- hopefully I will have a suitably intricate project ready to function as a showcase for its capabilities in a month or so.
Just to pick a turning point of sorts, it ended when you needed to password protect your "account". In short, the internet killed the "personal" computer.
> …personal computers have already proliferated beyond most government regulation. People already have them, just like (pardon the analogy) people already have hand guns. If you have a computer, use it. It is your equalizer. It is a way to organize and fight back against the impersonal institutions and the catch-22 regulations of modern society.[28]
And now look where we are at, we allowed impersonal institutions to use them against us.
The address given for the Byte Shop, "1063 El Camino Real in Mountain View", is ambiguous. It needs to specify either 1063 EAST El Camino Real or 1063 WEST El Camino Real, two quite different locations.
Neither of those matches the store that I remember patronizing circa 1978 or so, to buy a California Computer Systems S-100 box. That would have been on El Camino just north of Grant Road, circa 80 W El Camino.
It’s West. If you look at google maps for that location, there is a landmark pinned for “The Original Byte Shop”. There you can see a B&W photo from back in the day.
Remember, there was no Internet, so all info you got was by word of mouth from fellow enthusiasts, or from a few magazines, which were only to be found in a special newspaper shop in a nearby major city to which you made a pilgrimage by train every month.
The 'hobby' computers were no to be found in any 'regular' shop, but sold in what would now probably be called 'pop-ups' run by an enthusiast from his front room.
There was no software to be found, so you programmed everything yourself not for utility but simply for the joy of programming.
There were no standard architectures in the space, not even in terms of display or input. You had things like the Newton with a single line led display, the ZX81 with a membrame 'keyboard' or the Vic-20 with real video out (mostly PAL for europe).
You'ld travel with a little kaggle of friends to a regional 'hobby computer expo', which meant the region's pop-up store owners each had one or two computers set up on a table in some school's gym, and stare in awe at the 'advanced graphics' of the precursor of the BBC Micro that could display the (static) television test card in 8 bit.
Early Unix is not the product of hobbyist culture, but rather of an elite institution (Bell Labs) that only hired from the top science and engineering schools. The other institution involved in the early development of Unix was the CS Department of UC Berkeley, whose work was funded by DARPA, which is approximately the complete opposite of hobbyist culture.
When DARPA started funding the addition (by Berkeley CS Dept) of a TCP/IP stack to Unix in 1980, hobbyist culture was about 2 years into the start of its experimentation with the BBS. Specifically, according to Google Gemini, "The very first [BBS] for personal computers, named CBBS (Computerized Bulletin Board System), officially went online on February 16, 1978".
It is interesting to notice how the Unix design filtered down to hobbyists. Bell Labs started sharing Unix (at first, only with other elite institutions) and one reason the decision makers at the corporation (AT&T) that owned Bell Labs was willing to sign off on the sharing was that they had little hope of ever making any significant money from Unix because AT&T had entered into an agreement with the government that it would not enter the computer market. (At the same time, IBM agreed that it would not enter the telecommunications market. The thinking of the government was that each megacorporation was a monopolist or near-monopolist in its market, which would give it an unfair advantage in entering related markets.) Because of this sharing, it was on Richard Stallman's radar in 1983 when he chose to model his GNU system on Unix. Note that at the time Stallman was also an employee of an elite institution (MIT's AI Lab).
Richard Stallman free-software movement was the main force driving the Unix design into the hands of the hobbyists, but it took almost a decade for it to do that. When David Cutler arrived at Microsoft in October 1988 to start the NT project, Unix was still mainly associated with elite institutions.
I think it's different. Cutler's alleged distaste for Unix (don't have first-hand knowledge) was that he viewed it as basically a product of ivory tower academics as I understand it.
Back in 1977 I worked as a young lawyer in a firm of 10 which used a mimeograph machine in the basement to print (smelly) blue printed sheets of paper used for timesheets to record billing information. Case information was stored on index cards in different metal containers: one kept by file number; another kept alphabetically with multiple cards for every party to a case.
In 1978 I bought a Tandy Model I. In 1979 I joined a friend and we started our own firm. Before the end of 1980 our firm was using my Model I to track attorney time and send detailed billing statements to business clients. By 1984 Compaq computers had replaced every electric typewriter in my firm and were running billing software I had written together with detailed Wordperfect scripts I wrote that automated combining database lookups into legal forms.
No other firms had anything like it. Of course, that changed very rapidly. I have always regretted not having the balls to leave my law practice to commercialize my software - but I had to put food on the table. Nevertheless, computing has been the love of my life to this very day where, in retirement, all I do is tinker with my home network playing around with linux.
I'd argue that this hobby computer culture is still alive in well, but in a different form: the large number of vintage computing hobbyist groups that work to restore, understand, and make new hardware for the simplistic systems that formed the early days of computing. They enjoy the same optimism that drove the early hobby culture, but from a different vantage point - one of research and understanding - but the enjoyment and excitement are still there.
There's enjoyment and excitement, but rather than the optimism of an unbounded future of unimaginable wonders, in my experience they're animated by a profound pessimism about the current state of computing and where it's going.
The article is talking about hardware, but it largely applies to software just the same.
As a former JavaScript developer and a hiring manager who conducts interviews I would never hire a JavaScript developer who has not completed and published a personal application. To be very clear I don't care what your past titles are. You are not a senior developer if you have not written an application. You are not a leader, or team lead, if you have not managed people.
I used to get a free subscription to BYTE in the early 80s, probably through Scholastic. Had no understanding of the code or the images I was looking at but never stopped looking or trying to get it. Byte in particular was pretty thick for a magazine. I believe it had a spine like a book if I'm not mistaken ...
Computer Shopper was basically 900 pages of adverts with some editorial and reviews here and there to make people want to subscribe.
BYTE was a little less obnoxious about it, and the quality of the writing was superb. I got it occasionally as a teenager in the UK and always looked forward to it, because the information density was insane. I have the "Best of BYTE" book, and often dip into it as a comforting, sentimental read. I really do wish a magazine like it existed today.
Many of the early computer magazines were quite thick --- the TRS-80 magazine was quite dense, and I spent a lot of time entering computer programs from them.
Byte gradually lost page count over the years... May 1991 was 388 pages, while Oct. 1995 was 250.
People still build their own computers. Just the other day I saw a (relatively recent) design for an Intel 486 motherboard. The only difference is they don't really do anything with these hobby computers.
The article says, "Discussion of practical software applications appeared infrequently. One intrepid soul went so far as to hypothesize a microcomputer-based accounting program, but he doesn’t seem to have actually written it." So I think building hobby computers you don't really do anything with was already a popular activity at the time.
Alongside the "excessive discussion of “super space electronic hangman life-war pong” were hardware hackers hooking up an S100 bus to AppleIIs or running CP/M on some weird machine via a z80 add-on card.
The other classic, risible, software discussion were hackers suggesting writing a recipe database program. Typically to keep their (typically female) partner from condemning their hobby as a waste of time.
> Even as late as 1978, an informed observer could still consider interest in personal computers to be exclusive to a self-limiting community of hobbyists
The Personal Computer became an accepted, even required business device when IBM launched their PC in 1981 --- at that point, w/ WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 there was a standard set to which folks for the most part adhered --- going into a Compubiz? (blanking on the name) which sold Big-Blue to businesses was a lot different than going to an Apple reseller at that time, or earlier.
A vivid memory was being in a computer shop when a young accountant pulled up in his Trans Am and declared to the salesperson, "I need a Visicalc" --- once it was explained that this was a program for a computer and that one would be needed, the guy was set up with an order of basically one of everything in the store:
- Apple ][ w/ 80 column card and matching green monitor
- disk controller and dual disk drives
- 132 column printer
and of course a copy of Visicalc and a couple of books on using a PC all of which was then loaded up into his Trans Am and he drove off into the sunset --- always wondered how that worked out....
I don't think so. My dad worked for a consulting firm ("Big Eight" as they called it back then) in the early-mid 80s and as far as I can tell his job mainly involved slinging Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets on PCs. PCs very quickly infiltrated business starting in the 80s and had already left the exclusive "community of hobbyists".
In the 80's our school got a room full of apple IIs. It resulted in me getting a school report that said that I needed to learn to use computers for something other than programming.
It struck me as a little odd because you can't program a computer without having a task that you want to do. That was the boring bit though, getting the computer to do it was where the fun was.
In hindsight I never learned very much from the school computers. The limited access meant you couldn't dedicate the time needed for a deep dive. I was lucky to have computers at home. over time A trs-80, PET, vic-20, c64, Amiga. No Apple at home though. The real learning came from spending hours at a time mucking around with them. Also Compute, and Dr Dobbs were invaluable growing up in a town of about 5,000 information was limited.
For all that people complain about the internet rotting the brains of our youth, I know there are kids out there that are like I was, they have easy access to so much more information. They will do some great things, and they will do it because it's interesting, not because it will make them rich.
At least over here, the Apple II was in a different segment from the hobby computing scene. You'd find that in reputable office equipment stores, together with t he likes of the Osbourne etc.. It was out of the pricerange of 99% of the hobbyists that made do with brands such as Sinclair and Comodore at less than a fifth of the price.
ChuckMcM|9 months ago
As part of my 'rent' I could help out by entering numbers or verifying numbers for him. I discovered that his portfolio was worth more than $4M and I asked him why he was working at IBM if he was "rich". His answer was that he enjoyed working at IBM, you could just "spend" stock as you would lose out on future growth, and what would he do with his time if he wasn't working? The one conceit he admitted was that his house was paid for so he didn't have to pay a mortgage and that meant he had more disposable income every month.
That was a pretty amazing for me at that age.
The other random factoid was that for 10 years I was President of the "Home Brew Robotics Club" (which is still going on) and it was a direct outgrowth of the Home Brew Computer Club. It was started by Dick Prather as a "SIG" or Special Interest Group where HBCC members who were interested in using their computers with robots would meet and exchange ideas and such.
dfxm12|9 months ago
In a world so full of interesting, wonderful and curious things, I will never understand people who can't think of anything to do if they didn't have a job. Money is usually a limiting factor, but it sounds like it might not have been for this person.
WorkerBee28474|9 months ago
[0] https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
mrandish|9 months ago
Fortunately, a fair number of people who came to the club knew more than I did about our computer and computers in general. I acquired much of my early computer knowledge from those people as well as getting my first two programming jobs through club contacts despite having no resume or computer-specific education. Eventually the club grew to several hundred people, became a registered non-profit corporation and had a volunteer board of directors (who were all older and more experienced than I was about, well - almost everything). I describe myself as a "self-taught programmer" but a good part of that was also being informally 'club-taught' because I had people to ask when I got stuck. They may not have always had the answer but hearing how they thought through solving it was also an education.
I can trace back my entire life-long career as an (eventually) successful serial entrepreneur in desktop computer-centric software and hardware to that club I naively started 45 years ago - and I still have five close friends I met at the club despite all of us moving across the country and around the world several times. And each of those friends has gone on to have notably interesting and productive computer-related careers too.
bityard|9 months ago
I was talking to someone and explaining that I was taking classes at a local community college in preparation for computer science degree and mentioned off-hand that I might try to find some part-time Linux/BSD sysadmin work at some point. (I never fully attained the degree but also ended up not needing it.) The owner of a local IT consulting business overheard me and called me up the next day. I worked for him for a while and the next three jobs I moved to after that were all based on referrals and recommendations from people in that group.
jjav|9 months ago
To anyone unfamiliar, which is probably most people, OS-9 was a multi-user multi-tasking operating system which ran on 6809 CPUs. While not a UNIX, it was similar enough that the transition to SunOS was smooth.
To this day, I still alias "ls -la" to "dire", which comes from my muscle memory of typing "dir -e" in OS-9!
jwr|9 months ago
I have a feeling that we live in times of over-commercialization. Today, if you build something, the first criticism you'll hear is, "I can get something cheaper that is mass-produced in China." The second thing you'll hear is, "How do you monetize this?".
I think this puts a huge damper on innovation, especially among hobbyists.
PaulRobinson|9 months ago
I'm not sure it's all necessarily about over-commercialization, but it might be over-globalization.
We're obviously going through a timeline of the US trying to roll back globalized supply chains, and we don't know how that will end, but the one benefit it gave Americans cheap stuff at a cost of that production happening in the US. The benefit of cheap stuff will slowly be eradicated in the name of providing more job security in the US (at least, that's the plan - many are not convinced it makes much economic sense).
Everyone has benefited in some way from globalization (cheaper stuff means more economic utility), but we've also faced economic peril: off-shoring work means there is less work available near by. This is obviously true of blue collar work, but I think most people in the tech industry are familiar with Indian, Eastern European and Philippine companies taking work too.
In most of the West, there seems to have been an assumption that the West would become dominated by "knowledge workers" - all work would move to white collar professional office-bound, screen-based work - while the dirty and hard work of turning base materials into useful products, the blue collar stuff, would move off-shore. Within white collar work, the West would become more "managerial", more strategic, less productive in a tactical sense.
This idea isn't entirely new. Slavery and multiple empires were predicated on similar ideas, and while off-shoring isn't exactly modern slavery, the idea of paying poor people very little money so we can benefit does feel philosophically aligned, shall we say.
It's left us in a place where most people - both in the West and in those countries with off-shored work, and at very work layer from the hardest manual labour all the way up to managerial, perhaps even executive, levels - are worried about their economic future.
How can you have time for hobbies when you're worried about surviving the next 5 years?
This means people are now, more than ever, looking for things that raise their own utility - can I earn more money, and can I buy things cheaper? If you're doing something that doesn't move the needle on one or both of those sides of the equation, you start to feel like you're being left behind and the World is going to eat your lunch, and maybe you and your family too.
In that context, there's not much space for hobbies. Hobbies were a luxury only the affluent could afford hundreds of years ago and as wealth inequality rises again after decades of historic lows, the anxiety is starting to chip away through the middle classes and into the working classes again, so that hobbies won't exist again for many people over the next 20 or 30 years.
And yes, it does harm innovation. Most scientific and technological advancements of the last 500 years were started by people having the time to muck about with things, either as a hobby or as a paid vocation in a research lab or academic setting. That's potentially going away bit by bit. Curiosity has limited value in the future, as it becomes an extravagance few have time or resource for. Many people are subconsciously or even consciously asking themselves: if something doesn't lower a price on things I'm buying or increase the money I can get for what I'm selling, and it can't do that now, why do I care?
It's incredibly sad.
robterrell|9 months ago
BizarroLand|9 months ago
JKCalhoun|9 months ago
tocs3|9 months ago
I remember looking at lots of the add in the back of all the magazines and comic books (and paperbacks) being amazed at all the stuff on offer. Just send a check or money order and get you own ...
Then in the 1990's with internet commerce getting started I remember a lot of skepticism with comments like "who would send money to someone they have never met".
No drawing any conclusions here, just looking back and seeing similarities and changes.
kens|9 months ago
Interesting article on it: https://medium.com/@madmedic11671/forgotten-fraud-world-powe...
ToucanLoucan|9 months ago
WillAdams|9 months ago
My kids were quite amazed when they found my copy of a book whose approximate title was _Specialty Mail Order Catalogs_, which is apparently so obscure I'm not finding it on Goodreads or Abebooks --- will have to check the ISBN the next time it comes up and add it to the former.
CalRobert|9 months ago
segmondy|9 months ago
criddell|9 months ago
It feels like the era of the personal computer ended around the turn of the century though.
WillAdams|9 months ago
When OpenSCAD was first released, I finally had a 3D modeling environment which made sense to me.
When the Shapeoko was first announced on Kickstarter (which made use of the opensource projects Arduino, Grbl, and Makerslide, and was iself initially opensource) I finally had a robotic shop assistant which allowed me to make pretty much anything I wanted w/o the need to make myriad fixtures and jigs or to limit myself to traditional joinery techniques.
When Python was added to OpenSCAD as: https://pythonscad.org/ I finally had a programming environment which allowed not just 3D modeling but also mutable variables _and_ the ability to write out files so as to make DXFs or G-code.
So, I am working on:
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
and have been using it for my personal projects for a while now --- hopefully I will have a suitably intricate project ready to function as a showcase for its capabilities in a month or so.
JKCalhoun|9 months ago
msgodel|9 months ago
On the other hand I was thinking something similar with smartphones and look how that ended up.
trinsic2|9 months ago
And now look where we are at, we allowed impersonal institutions to use them against us.
fernly|9 months ago
Neither of those matches the store that I remember patronizing circa 1978 or so, to buy a California Computer Systems S-100 box. That would have been on El Camino just north of Grant Road, circa 80 W El Camino.
always-open|9 months ago
PeterStuer|9 months ago
The 'hobby' computers were no to be found in any 'regular' shop, but sold in what would now probably be called 'pop-ups' run by an enthusiast from his front room.
There was no software to be found, so you programmed everything yourself not for utility but simply for the joy of programming.
There were no standard architectures in the space, not even in terms of display or input. You had things like the Newton with a single line led display, the ZX81 with a membrame 'keyboard' or the Vic-20 with real video out (mostly PAL for europe).
You'ld travel with a little kaggle of friends to a regional 'hobby computer expo', which meant the region's pop-up store owners each had one or two computers set up on a table in some school's gym, and stare in awe at the 'advanced graphics' of the precursor of the BBC Micro that could display the (static) television test card in 8 bit.
ferguess_k|9 months ago
hollerith|9 months ago
When DARPA started funding the addition (by Berkeley CS Dept) of a TCP/IP stack to Unix in 1980, hobbyist culture was about 2 years into the start of its experimentation with the BBS. Specifically, according to Google Gemini, "The very first [BBS] for personal computers, named CBBS (Computerized Bulletin Board System), officially went online on February 16, 1978".
It is interesting to notice how the Unix design filtered down to hobbyists. Bell Labs started sharing Unix (at first, only with other elite institutions) and one reason the decision makers at the corporation (AT&T) that owned Bell Labs was willing to sign off on the sharing was that they had little hope of ever making any significant money from Unix because AT&T had entered into an agreement with the government that it would not enter the computer market. (At the same time, IBM agreed that it would not enter the telecommunications market. The thinking of the government was that each megacorporation was a monopolist or near-monopolist in its market, which would give it an unfair advantage in entering related markets.) Because of this sharing, it was on Richard Stallman's radar in 1983 when he chose to model his GNU system on Unix. Note that at the time Stallman was also an employee of an elite institution (MIT's AI Lab).
Richard Stallman free-software movement was the main force driving the Unix design into the hands of the hobbyists, but it took almost a decade for it to do that. When David Cutler arrived at Microsoft in October 1988 to start the NT project, Unix was still mainly associated with elite institutions.
ghaff|9 months ago
keernan|9 months ago
In 1978 I bought a Tandy Model I. In 1979 I joined a friend and we started our own firm. Before the end of 1980 our firm was using my Model I to track attorney time and send detailed billing statements to business clients. By 1984 Compaq computers had replaced every electric typewriter in my firm and were running billing software I had written together with detailed Wordperfect scripts I wrote that automated combining database lookups into legal forms.
No other firms had anything like it. Of course, that changed very rapidly. I have always regretted not having the balls to leave my law practice to commercialize my software - but I had to put food on the table. Nevertheless, computing has been the love of my life to this very day where, in retirement, all I do is tinker with my home network playing around with linux.
jasoneckert|9 months ago
kragen|9 months ago
unknown|9 months ago
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austin-cheney|9 months ago
As a former JavaScript developer and a hiring manager who conducts interviews I would never hire a JavaScript developer who has not completed and published a personal application. To be very clear I don't care what your past titles are. You are not a senior developer if you have not written an application. You are not a leader, or team lead, if you have not managed people.
fitsumbelay|9 months ago
PaulRobinson|9 months ago
BYTE was a little less obnoxious about it, and the quality of the writing was superb. I got it occasionally as a teenager in the UK and always looked forward to it, because the information density was insane. I have the "Best of BYTE" book, and often dip into it as a comforting, sentimental read. I really do wish a magazine like it existed today.
WillAdams|9 months ago
Byte gradually lost page count over the years... May 1991 was 388 pages, while Oct. 1995 was 250.
greenbit|9 months ago
phendrenad2|9 months ago
kragen|9 months ago
emmelaich|9 months ago
The other classic, risible, software discussion were hackers suggesting writing a recipe database program. Typically to keep their (typically female) partner from condemning their hobby as a waste of time.
TedDoesntTalk|9 months ago
WHAT? That was true even well into the 1980s.
WillAdams|9 months ago
A vivid memory was being in a computer shop when a young accountant pulled up in his Trans Am and declared to the salesperson, "I need a Visicalc" --- once it was explained that this was a program for a computer and that one would be needed, the guy was set up with an order of basically one of everything in the store:
- Apple ][ w/ 80 column card and matching green monitor
- disk controller and dual disk drives
- 132 column printer
and of course a copy of Visicalc and a couple of books on using a PC all of which was then loaded up into his Trans Am and he drove off into the sunset --- always wondered how that worked out....
BirAdam|9 months ago
acheron|9 months ago
mickey475778|9 months ago
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bandoti|9 months ago
The fact that it comes with the complete assembly language, circuit diagrams, and BASIC language reference is something you just don’t see today.
Being able to write whatever in whichever places in memory makes it more of a tool fostering creative expression.
Honestly, before reading through those manuals I never really needed to consider having to implement multiplication in terms of addition instructions.
Even though those are basic properties of arithmetic, it’s easy to take for granted.
Lerc|9 months ago
It struck me as a little odd because you can't program a computer without having a task that you want to do. That was the boring bit though, getting the computer to do it was where the fun was.
In hindsight I never learned very much from the school computers. The limited access meant you couldn't dedicate the time needed for a deep dive. I was lucky to have computers at home. over time A trs-80, PET, vic-20, c64, Amiga. No Apple at home though. The real learning came from spending hours at a time mucking around with them. Also Compute, and Dr Dobbs were invaluable growing up in a town of about 5,000 information was limited.
For all that people complain about the internet rotting the brains of our youth, I know there are kids out there that are like I was, they have easy access to so much more information. They will do some great things, and they will do it because it's interesting, not because it will make them rich.
PeterStuer|9 months ago