I'm a little bit in awe at the prospect of having so much stuff as a teenager :)
Is it super accepting parents and he just scrounged what he could somehow, parents/family in the biz/already hobbyists, super rich parents/family...
Was it all actually exceptionally cheap?
Help me understand how this happened...
The big expense was a soldering iron which I paid £5 for, a lot of money, by trading excess book vouchers I got for it (people kept buying me book vouchers endlessly). That landed me a 1965ish weller iron. That allowed me to fix anything.
Not a great one by any means, I certainly wouldn't be doing SMD soldering with it, but adequate for through hole and point to point wiring. It probably won't last as long either.
My old man has a couple of soldering irons for the 70's that still work great. You'd be paying over $100 for the same iron these days.
He also still has the same roll of solder that he had in the 80's. A kilogram of solder lasts a long time. In fact, most of his electrical tools from the 80's are in good condition and get regular use.
I’ve got a newer Weller TCP station now that gets used for everything from 0603 SMD devices through massive capacitors. Cost around $300 (more than a Hakko) but was worth it as it’s absolutely bomb proof and a pleasure to use for extended periods.
Most of my equipment now is from the 1970s and 1980s. It’s cheap, reliable and easy to repair if it does break.
Generally speaking tools are much, much cheaper in relative terms than they used to be.
I remember looking longingly at a mini-wood lathe in a model magazine in the 1980s. It was super cheap, ad something like $300.
There's no way it worked as well as something like this random < $50 one now: https://www.banggood.com/DC-24V-Mini-Lathe-Beads-Machine-Pol...
Combined to growing up in a non poor family, some scrounging around second hand stores, getting broken stuff from friends/family members that you repair yourself, etc... is how it’d happen.
Well, I did. It launched me on a career of 'rescuing' left-over hardware which still keeps me from buying new stuff unless absolutely necessary. While I might not be a good consumer (my father's oft-heard reaction when I spoke of my latest conquest: 'if everyone were like you the economy would crumble, just toss the rubbish and buy something new') but I don't feel this to be a prime responsibility: we're not here to support the economy, the economy exists by virtue of all our interactions. If the economy can only survive by virtue of people being wasteful the solution is not to produce more waste but to fix the economy. This will lead to some articles becoming more expensive - like they used to be - but it will also lead to less waste being produced, fixing another problem.
The rapid pace of technical developments between the 50's - the era from which some of the stuff our teenage bedrooms were filled with - and now has been part of the reason for the development of modern throw-away equipment. Now that this pace has slowed down and in some cases halted or reversed (want a good compact cassette player? Buy a second-hand older model and restore it) there is often no direct incitement for replacement of 'obsolete' hardware: an amplifier from the 90's sounds just as good as one from two decades later. It would make sense to repair that older model instead of buying something new, were it not for the fact that somewhere along the line manufacturers 'forgot' to think about repairability when designing hardware, 'forgot' about providing schematic diagrams or only provided them to 'authorised' repair centres, started using hard to source components, etc. Fortunately those latter 'omissions' have been reversed for a good deal by the existence of active repair communities on the 'net ([1], [2], etc) so the curious and enterprising can still continue on their mission of learning and discovery.
The era of the linked article was an era of transistorization. His vacuum tube amp reminded me of the research lab grade Tektronix 545-series o-scope I owned with 500 watts of vacuum tubes and those weird ceramic and gold plate standoffs instead of PCBs, my Heathkit SB-102 vacuum tube ham SSB radio, and my motorola land mobile receiver and transmitter strips converted for the then new 2 meter ham radio repeater fad (which has since mostly disappeared). That o-scope in the mid 50s cost someone about one new house, by the mid 80s I got it for $100 with all the plugins, while living in a $100K house, figure it dropped in value by a thousand over a quarter century. My dad paid about a mortgage payment for the SB-102 when it was new, maybe 15 years later I got it for free when he upgraded, just too many microprocessor controlled features with no change in performance specs..
Note that with computers you can't do anything in 2018 with 1998 equipment, it won't work or the software and protocols are not designed to be compatible on purpose. However literal research lab grade work in the mid 50s is roughly equivalent to average dude work in the 80s so in the late 80s paying $100 for a file cabinet sized o-scope was reasonable because it was totally useful and practical and I learned a lot using it, if not terribly portable or reliable (burning out tubes, need to realign after replacement, etc)
There was also an interesting aspect to 70s stagflation, everything before 1980 cost ten times as much, so that also excited the depreciation. In the 50s $10K would buy a nice house, but once people got used to paying $100K (and now $1M) a dollar isn't worth what it used to be.
Also the nostalgia of time smooths things over, but a 1950 car was kinda rusted out and worn out by 1959 so people get weird feels about a kid driving a 1950-whatever automobile when that thing was pretty worthless at the time the kid had it in 1959, and this extends to electronics. I'm sure someone saved a lot of money for a long time to buy the very late 60s Sony black and white 7 inch TV I had in the early 80s as a home computer monitor, and to have that as a kid as my computer monitor during the moon landings would imply I was quite rich; but in 1982 or so that TV being used as a monitor would imply a bit of poverty, maybe, and in a nostalgic sense it gets blurred into "70s" and I must have been a rich kid, LOL.
This is already the case with computers. Nobody does anything new or exciting or more productive in nearly a decade. There are tail-fin like style changes. Someday a teen in 2030 will get a 2020 laptop that cost a huge pile of money in 2020, totally handles the workload in 2030, and some dude in 2070 will accuse the teen of having been rich because that laptop cost a boatload of money in 2020. Of course in 2030 with a scratched up screen and dead battery and deeply un-stylish exterior the kid only had to pay $50 inflation adjusted equivalent, so the kid was not necessarily rich.
Still, I think its a definite ethical difference - back then, kids developed the skills to survive in capitalistic society pretty early - paper routes, odd jobs, etc. These days, it really seems like raising kids to deal with capitalism involves turning them into rabid frothy-mouthed commies who only want to tear down the state and replace it with non-work-required utopia...
These days, it really seems like raising kids to deal with
capitalism involves turning them into rabid frothy-mouthed
commies who only want to tear down the state and replace it
with non-work-required utopia
As a capitalist myself here's a book I really recommend:
https://www.amazon.com/Marx-Beginners-Rius/dp/0375714618
I suspect you will walk away from it thinking the same thing most people do: Marx's criticisms of capitalism are absolutely vital and relevant to this day... and his solutions are even worse, and that capitalism is still probably the least terrible solution we've got. :)
But more to the point: there is no definition of socialism or communism that even remotely advocates this a "non-work-required utopia." It's all about work and workers!
(Now, in practice, socialist/communist societies wound up stratifying anyway, and elites often didn't exactly have to spend their days in a coal mine or shoveling pig shit like the commonfolk. But that's been pretty much true of every economic system under the sun since the beginning of mankind. So, even a cursory glance at history tells us that this is not a problem unique to socialism or communism.)
What I do want to point out though, is that teens don't work like they used to. Some think thats a good thing; others do not. Alas, only the prosperity of future generations can really provide a valid indicator ..
Those adults are almost always wrong - although not necessarily in the obvious ways. A small minority of teens run successful YT/Instagram/WA/Etsy channels, and some of them make surprisingly good money from them.
I suspect a lot of kids are busy doing things that look better on a college application.
Anecdote time: I grew up in an area with a good mix of blue collar and white collar families. Reunion season is coming up so I reconnected with some old friends. There's actually strong INVERSE correlation between "had a typical summer job" and "success in the marketplace". Most of the doctors/lawyers/engineers/software people didn't work typical teenager summer jobs and are now doing very well, both financially and in life (families, houses, health, hobbies). A depressing percentage of the people who did work summer jobs are still working those same jobs.
The people who are doing the best had a summer activity, but not a typical teenage job (or even a job). E.g., freelance programming, prestigious math/science camps/competition prep, volunteering and hospitals and in research labs, etc. Years later, you see the dividends paying on an early investment in increasing the value of one's labor.
IMO the blend of protestant work ethic and capitalism on display in the parent comment can be a dangerous one to teach kids. That fantasy is not how the world works. No one gives a damn how hard you work; what they care about is what you get done for them. Otherwise we'd all be digging trenches with spoons.