[spoonjim]

I disagree with your take on the "makers" market. The maker world is far more interesting today than in 1985.

Yes, there are no "brick and mortar" stores because in 1985, brick and mortar was the only type of store that existed. Nowadays, Internet shopping is so developed that Adafruit, Sparkfun, Digi-Key, etc. don't need brick and mortar stores. The experience of shopping for parts online is much better than at a Radioshack -- it's not like you need to physically inspect a 555 timer to gain any information about it before you buy it, like you would with a winter jacket. The only thing lost is the ability to get a part today which sometimes sucks but that's life. We don't need 6 magazines anymore because people put their code on Github and their projects on YouTube, and for free. Profits in the industry are probably lower but that's because there's more competition from other vendors and from people just sharing this stuff with no profit motive, which maybe sucks for the industry but is fantastic for the hobbyists of limited means.

Today, hobbyist makers are building stuff that actually does something useful, that has no commercial substitute. With Github, YouTube, forums, people are inspiring each other to make more interesting things than in 1985. Back in 1985 people were usually building stuff that could be bought. Today people are building stuff that can't be bought, and if there's enough of a market for it they productize it with Kickstarter or Tindie. People are sharing code and board designs and projects, and whether at the high end like Mark Rober or the low end like some guy's homebrewing controller the maker world is really bursting with success.

[ChuckMcM]

I think you have a valid point but did you experience the "friction free" experience of walking into an electronics store idly and then walking out with all of the parts to build a project that afternoon? Most mixed HW/SW hackers accumulate a "stash" of components, and from that stash one can sometimes build new projects, but for me, there is a huge impediment when I have 90% of the parts and then have to wait for the last part for a week (well I can get it in a couple of days if I pay $30 in shipping).

And the difference, for me, between user hosted content (Github and Youtube), and a magazine is that the magazine also has an editor who both made sure the article was clear and for the better magazines perhaps built the project themselves to see how it worked. There is a ton of content from people who don't know what they are doing which obscures the content from people who do. It can be frustrating for people starting because there are so many variables. Did I build it wrong? Did they describe it correctly? Did I miss a step that was obvious to the writer but not me? You get a few projects that fail and you get disillusioned.

A good example of this is a high school kid I helped who was convinced they sucked at soldering because it never worked for them like it did on youtube. Except they were using silver solder "because that is what the hardware store had." Hmmm? Obvious to someone who was taught soldering by someone who knew how to solder, but not obvious when the content creator assumes everyone knows how to solder and what solders are used, so leaves that out of their presentations.

Don't get me started on Kickstarter :-) It has put more people into bankruptcy than MLM in my opinion. When you don't know what you don't know, how can you possibly predict how much money you need to deliver a random number of units of your idea?

Solid, curated, material for new people and advanced people. The stuff magazines used to provide, has made things more difficult rather than less difficult. And it is my opinion that this is at least part of the problem with declining STEM capabilities of students these days.

[jacobolus]

> Kickstarter [...] has put more people into bankruptcy than MLM in my opinion.

I don’t understand what this means. The creators of kickstart projects overcommit and then bankrupt themselves trying to fulfill orders? Backers of kickstart projects bankrupt themselves supporting more projects than their financial resources allow?

[sbierwagen]

The Open Locksport kickstarter is one notable disaster: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2012/10/schuyler-towne-a... Back in the day there were an endless series of "$100 3d printers". Etc etc.

Adding the required 50% margin to the BOM of a consumer product is painful and unintuitive. Most kickstarters are done by regular people, and as a normal consumer it can be hard to be appropriately pessimistic when pricing a product you have to manufacture and sell. It's endlessly temping to lower the price.

[ChuckMcM]

Yes, they price their product without understanding what it costs to manufacture something and then find themselves shipping units at a net loss, or not shipping at all and carrying around a burden of guilt. At least four 3D printer kickstarters failed in this way and three or four drone kickstarters that I watched but didn't participate in also failed in this way.

[iancmceachern]

Exactly this. Plus there are lots of other hidden costs (FCC certification, UL testing, etc that inexperienced people aren't aware of to bake onto the cost.

I've heard that Kickstarter, etc. Are best used as marketing platforms. I.e. only put a product on there once you've made it to the point where you are ready for mass production, have the suppliers waiting, and even products in hand. It's doesn't work to "launch" products from the concept of prototype stage to market.

[teclordphrack2]

My magazine is not going to disappear like so much content has. Even when microchip bought atmel there are still google links to atmel stuff that is no longer there... or is there but at a different address.

[kragen]

It sounds like you're saying that new hackers don't have a good place to go for reliable information, and in the 01980s they did, because magazines and books were reliable, and now they're gone? And that it's harder to get electronic parts now than it was in the 01980s?

I think I disagree with both of these. But I'll only tackle the first one.

With respect to reliability of information, I agree there's an enormous amount of misinformation out there now, especially in places like YouChube. But ⓐ there's also excellent reliable information out there on Wikipedia and Stack Exchange, for which there was no equivalent in the 01980s, and ⓑ even YouChube isn't that bad.

Let's take a look at the particular example you picked, misinformation or lack of information about solder types. My top ten hits for [how to solder] are https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqV2xU1fee8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu3TYBs65FM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rmErwU5E-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp37DPZVdRI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EW9Y8rDm4kE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qps9woUGkvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxMV6wGS3NY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpkkfK937mU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxqZJH3SfN4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwU9SqO0udU, which mysteriously all ten are about soldering electronics and none about plumbing. Of these #1, #3, and #5 talk about lead-free solder vs. leaded electronics solder, and #2 does that and also specifically warns you away from silver solder and acid flux. Only #4 (which is of very poor quality), #6, and #7 omit information on the question of different solder types. (#6 does mention "rosin-core solder" but doesn't explain that there are other kinds.)

Item #8 is a special case: it talks a lot about flux, shows rosin-core solder highly magnified, talks about solder composition... but it incorrectly claims the rosin is "a weak acid" and doesn't really mention the existence of other types of solder until a passing mention of lead-free solder near the end.

(I, uh, ran into my writing deadline before checking items #9 and #10. Comments welcome.)

So, even though YouChube is much less reliable than Wikipedia or Stack Exchange, I think that if you were to spend fifteen minutes watching randomly chosen videos that YouChube serves you up when you google [how to solder], you would find out that you need special electronics solder, and most of the other information you got would be correct. And you would have spent fifteen minutes watching experienced technicians explain and demonstrate proper and improper soldering technique under high magnification.

Of course, this is still vastly inferior to being taught soldering by someone who knows how to solder! But we weren't comparing YouChube to apprenticeships, were we? We were comparing YouChube to reading Popular Electronics and, I don't know, the worthless pap that passed for "educational TV" in the 01980s. PBS or something. Most PBS shows were the TV equivalent of WIRED Magazine: just enough information to give you the illusion of understanding, but not enough to actually learn anything.

As for the reliability of magazines and books, I recall my Encyclopedia of Science and Invention in the late 01980s solemnly informed me that computer RAM consisted of magnetic cores and that fluidic integrated circuits were commonplace in missile guidance systems. OMNI Magazine was full of UFO speculation. The how-to booklet that came with my Radio Shack 200-in-1 electronics kit gave me wiring diagrams for how to wire up a Hartley oscillator, but no equations and not even the name "Hartley oscillator", so I really had no hope of ever understanding how the damn thing worked. In high school in 01992 I took a "pre-engineering electronics" class, whose textbook explained to us that TTL logic had propagation delays around 5 ns, while CMOS logic was more like 20 ns — true in 01972, but that was the year the school was buying a 200MHz DEC Alpha αxp server, which I naturally deduced must consist entirely of ECL.† And I recall getting very excited when I started reading books in the school library about the Bermuda Triangle, and then there were the Hare Krishna books explaining how worms bite babies in the womb and how Krsna Consciousness would liberate you from the cycle of rebirth, and the books explaining how to develop your psychic powers...

So I think YouChube and BitTorrent and the like have vastly improved the access-to-information situation, even in the specific example you chose, and moreover there are vastly better information sources around. I already mentioned Wikipedia and Stack Exchange, but there are also reputable open-source projects like QUCS and yosys, there's ##electronics on libera.chat, there's Hackaday, there's still Don Lancaster, there's Kuphaldt's excellent open-content textbook at http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/, and there's the Internet Archive; and, for those living in places where they're legal, Library Genesis and sci-hub provide instant access to a depth of knowledge on nearly any topic that vastly exceeds what even any university library had in the 01980s.

There is vastly more misinformation available. But there was always plenty of misinformation. There's also vastly more of precisely the solid, curated material for new people and advanced people that you're looking for, and it's immensely more accessible!

______

† The Alpha was of course a CMOS microprocessor, like every microprocessor I've ever seen or heard of. CMOS propagation delays were down below a nanosecond in 01992, but our textbook was outdated by over an order of magnitude.

[mjevans]

I respect your idea of trying to make dates valid for 10x the duration of 4 digit dates; however prefix with a leading zero also often implies octal parsing. Current date formats ignore that for fields of fixed with, and make various assumptions in cases of dynamic width.

There doesn't appear to be a notation similar to the C style prefixes 0x and 0 (hex and octal), nor like the mentioned assembly language post-fixes.

It would greatly aid clarity if there were a clear way of denoting these were dates. Visually, my language parsing center is optimized to assume years are 4 or 2 digits in length. Five is confusing.

https://superuser.com/questions/885624/proper-way-to-denote-...

[b112]

Plus, it is only short term thinking, to not write it as 000001987, for example.

And what sort of long term thinking, wants all that extra electricity used to denote pre-zeros endlessly, thus increasing data transmission, disk space usage, and even calories to type it. I bet current excess power usage, is equal to at least a bucket full of coal yearly, and that adds up when thinking over 10k years or more.

[sbierwagen]

Five digit years is a Long Now foundation thing. Saying "it looks like octal" is new to me though.

[fomine3]

I've never heard the foundation until now. I'm on octal side since here's HN.

[kragen]

Hey, you're one of today's lucky ten thousand. You're in for a real treat if you like hacking — there may have lived hackers greater than Danny Hillis, but probably no more than a few dozen, perhaps none alive today. And almost none of those had access to the means to realize their potential.

The story begins:

"There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has never played before. The Clock’s chimes have been programmed to not repeat themselves for 10,000 years. Most times the Clock rings when a visitor has wound it, but the Clock hoards energy from a different source and occasionally it will ring itself when no one is around to hear it. It’s anyone’s guess how many beautiful songs will never be heard over the Clock’s 10 millennial lifespan.

"The Clock is real. It is now being built inside a mountain in western Texas. ..."

https://longnow.org/clock/

https://rosettaproject.org/

[kragen]

8 and 9 aren't valid octal digits since C89 :)

[brysonreece]

This hits the nail on the head.

I've been an active community member for over ten years (from age 12, I'm 24 now) and the truth is that with the availability of parts — combined with all the benefits of traditional open source — the hardware/"maker" scene has absolutely been flourishing for the past few years.

With rapid prototyping becoming more commonplace it's completely reasonable for your run-of-the-mill maker to own a 3D printer or be able to turn around a custom PCB within a week, tools that massively accelerate the development phases of early ideas or business ventures. We'll definitely start seeing more companies taking advantage of the community spoils as technology continues to advance at a faster and faster rate over the coming years, especially when those same tools are just as easily employed by your competitors.

(Hardware based startups are in a unique position as the tools to compete with larger companies or scale product are more readily available than ever before. At this moment for a few hundred dollars it's completely possible to produce thousands of PCBs through online overseas services, ready to ship to customers.)

Aside — it's also a community that is heavily invested in the history of computing/technology and how we got here - in a way it's comforting to be able to replicate a circuit from three decades ago, circuits that used to cost thousands, and experience first hand computing history for pennies on the dollar.

[kragen]

I think this is right. In 01980 you needed a lot of people working on a magazine and buying ads in it to get Don Lancaster's columns out to the teeming unwashed masses. Now Don just posts them on https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu21.shtml#05.23.21 and he can publish lots more than he ever could back in the newsprint days. (The only loss is that he could use a proofreader.)

I don't know how much Don spends on hosting† to make everything he's ever written instantly available to every hacker in the whole world but I'm guessing it's about US$100 a month. Inflation-adjusted, that's probably less than Popular Electronics Magazine spent running the office coffeepot. Not counting the price of the coffee.

He's written about the days Chuck is—wrongly, I think—eulogizing in https://www.tinaja.com/glib/waywere.pdf.

The objective we should measure ourselves against is not the headcount in retail sales (though Amazon seems to have a workforce of substantial size) or the number of inkstains on people's hands; it's access to knowledge and tools, and the power to create that access unlocks. It's people dreaming of wonderful things that never were, and making them real. It's human flourishing.

So, how are we doing on that?

______

† Unlike people who just host on GitHub, who depend on Microsoft's continued goodwill to foot their publishing bill, Don hosts his own pages.

[mbesto]

> The maker world is far more interesting today than in 1985.

I think you missed the meaning of the word "market". The parent was commenting on the economics of the maker's market and you were talking simply about the proliferation and innovation of today vs history.

> which maybe sucks for the industry but is fantastic for the hobbyists of limited means.

Agreed. Which is what makes you both probably right.

[JKCalhoun]

Agree. This is a golden age for makers — at least electronics, software makers — perhaps others.

Professional looking PCB's, inexpensive components direct from China ... all within the hobbyists reach.