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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

A fairly rich teenager.

"Kids these days" wouldn't understand but the ordinary family didn't have the money to buy anything they wanted, unlike today where middle class people can largely by most of the ordinary day to day consumer electronic stuff without much thought about the money. I'm not saying everyone can, but certainly in my middle class life in the 1970's there was no money for buying teenagers a bedroom full of electronics.

I had to beg and wait many years till we got a home computer.

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If you read it he notes how he earned the money to buy some of the components. For one, he built a stone driveway, which would be pretty backbreaking work. Other pieces he found at the town landfill.

And to be honest it isn't high-end gear for the most part. I mean, a lot of it is from Radio Shack. And the higher-end stuff isn't new and/or had to be repaired.

The reality is, even if it were all free, it would be rare for a teenager to have enough physical space to store all this crap in the 1970s. Especially in their bedroom vs the garage or basement.

"Today’s new homes are 1,000 square feet larger than in 1973, and the living space per person has doubled over last 40 years"

http://www.aei.org/publication/todays-new-homes-are-1000-squ...

Just having your own bedroom if multiple kids would be considered wealthy!

Certainly in Britain.

America was always different though, middle class kids always have more. I remember watching tv shows with kids having a phone in their room that blew my mind as a kid sharing a room with two brothers and very locked down phone in the house.

Free local calls amazed me too when I found out about that.

And refills of soda.

Land of plenty indeed.

It's less "land of plenty" than it is the federal government paying for big bedrooms instead of universal healthcare and a proper social safety net. As part of the post-depression New Deal and especially after WWII, single-family housing was very heavily subsized by the federal government. However, these policies were coupled with segregationist housing restrictions that pretty much excluded non-white Americans from the rise of suburbia in the 50s. While white suburban families were accumulating wealth through home ownership and mortgage equity, black families (as well as rural Americans who didn't see many of the benefits of the industrial boom of the 40s and 50s) were increasingly pushed into poverty.

TBH it looks like a remodeled attic room. And the way it's all crammed in a corner suggests that it isn't taking up an especially large amount of space. We don't see how large the rest of the room is.

I live in a pretty average US home (built in 1971, raised ranch similar to this:https://photos.zillowstatic.com/p_e/ISi3u8fp8ljszu1000000000...) and there's plenty of room in the 2 non-master bedrooms to dedicate half the room to a crammed-in arrangement like this, with a bed crammed in the other half.

I also had a bedroom full of electronics in the late 1970s/early 1980s. I certainly wasn't a rich teenager. All the audio gear was given or scrounged. For example, I got given a very good turntable by the father of a friend of my parents for free, when he upgraded his. I didn't even know him, but I'd got a reputation for knowing about electronics, and it was starting to become a little flakey. People would just give me old gear, if it developed an intermittent fault. Old gear was pretty easy for me to fix, but getting it repaired professionally was expensive, and so they replaced things and gave the old ones to me.

My mother worked for a company that made cash dispenser (ATM) machines. Every now and then, they'd scrap some old machines, and she'd tip me off. I'd raid the bins behind the company, and carry off whatever I could carry - professional grade power supplies, AC motors, all sorts of electronics that I'd de-solder components from and re-use.

We'd also raid the local council dump when the workers weren't watching. A surprising amount of stuff got thrown away that could be fixed and re-sold to friends for a little extra pocket money.

Sometime around 1982, aged 15, I saved up and bought a Jupiter Ace computer. It had 3K of RAM, and was programmed in Forth. That summer, I wrote a whole load of games for it, and sold them on cassette through a computer magazine. That paid for the computer several times over. It was never a popular machine, and I think I was one of only about three people selling games for it that summer.

Then my school threw out an old teletype. I got permission to take it. There was no printer available for the Jupiter Ace, so I resolved to connect the teletype. Trouble was there wasn't an RS232 interface available for the Ace either. I'd built a TTL-logic parallel board for the Ace from scratch. To get +/- 12V for RS232 I used one of the cash machine 24V smoothed power supplies, used second hand cash machine transistors to switch the power via a parallel port pin, and wrote an RS232 implementation in software in Z80 machine code (hand assembled, as I didn't have an assembler). Eventually it all worked. I must have been the only owner of a Jupiter Ace that had a 1960s printer attached.

The Jupiter Ace had one of those crummy rubber keyboards. I'd scavenged enough cash machine keypads, so I desoldered all the keys from them, etched my own circuit board, and made a proper keyboard. That made programming much nicer.

Anyway, my parents weren't wealthy, and I certainly wasn't. But you should never underestimate a resourceful teenager.

About the teletype -- I didn't think they used RS-232, but a current loop (like a telephone) with some early pre-ascii (5-bit?) encoding?

It's been a long time, but I'm fairly sure it was 110 baud RS232, 7 bit ASCII, all upper case.

I think it was an ASR 33, or at least I recall it looking like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33 Unfortunately I don't have it any more - my parents threw it out a few years after I left home.

Wikipedia certainly implies the ASR 33 used current loop. If I recall correctly, mine had a DB25 connector, which likely indicates RS232, and is probably how I figured out it was RS232 in the first place, as information was hard to come by back then. I do know I used a 24V power supply from a cash machine, using a potential divider to create a +/- 12V signal, which is consistent with the model I had having an RS232 interface. Getting the timing right in software was a lot of trial and error.

Edit: this page indicates that RS232 was available as an option on the ASR-33 teletype: http://bytecollector.com/asr_33.htm

I had one of those too, an ASR 33 with RS-232. I connected it to an Intel SDK-85, which had optional RS-232 stuff on it. Fun times!

If I recall, the teletype was sourced from the Green Bank Observatory, which had some really impressive old equipment - racks of hardware with nixie tube displays, all that kind of stuff.

I totally recognise where you're coming from. I was the same, skip raiding, etc. One Christmas I asked for a present which was a job lot of ex-mainframe PCBs I'd seen advertised in the back of an electronics magazine, Can't remember the cost, but a significant chunk must have been delivery, because it was a fair haul. The boards were just stuffed with 74-series TTL DIP chips, and a lot of red LEDs too. Pretty much every logic chip I used throughout my teenage years came from those boards, and I know for a fact I still have some of the LEDs in my collection - I recognise them by their rather pointed profile, not as cylindrical as modern ones.

Electronics has gotten cheaper though. I bought my first PDA more than 15 years ago. It was second hand and still cost me something like £200. Last year I bought my son a Kindle Fire to play with on long drives and that cost me something like £40 in the Black Friday sales and frankly it does a lot more than my PDA ever could - not just technical capability but also software availability. Plus finding cheap or free software for the PDA would mean turning to less legal avenues where as tablets these days are full of cheap and free software.

Even the ZX Spectrum, for those unfamiliar: it is a 30 year old British micro computer designed around being _cheap_, was £125 of "old" money. Now compare that to a Raspberry Pi. Heck you can even get a wide choice of budget laptops for the same price as what the Spectrum was (if you take inflation into account).

So I wouldn't say people are financially better of now than we were 30 or 40 years ago. I just think the financial barrier for entry into electronics has been lowered.

I wonder what PDA you are referring to.

15 years ago would be the heyday of the Palm and there, lots of software was free or even open source. I certainly didn't need to buy any software back then to fill that little productivity machine.

BTW, I was much more productive on the Palm than on modern smartphone devices. For example note-taking was much better with a stylus than with a touch interface.

This was a proper PDA rather than a smart phone (I refuse to accept what Apple "invented" smart phones). So a large screened Windows CE device with a stylus.

Maybe I was looking in the wrong places but there didn't seem to be much free stuff for Win CE back in 2002.

WinCE devices were much more business oriented than Palm, probably because they had in the beginning a much smaller market share. So your experience was likely representative for this platform.

I completely forgot that they were around at that time.

I didn't get the impression it was more business oriented than Palm. I mean CE certainly had productivity tools like a cut down version of Office and support for Active sync (which I hated). I think the real problem was Windows PDAs of that era didn't even share a common CPU so you'd have multiple versions of software targeting different chipsets. I'm pretty sure that would have put a lot of developers off. But there were a few gems on the platform, like Tomb Raider (which actually played really well).

I might had a dig around and see if I've still got it. Might be a fun device to repurpose.

The Note 8 has a pretty nice stylus. Better than any stylus I ever had on a Windows CE device (never owned anything from Palm, so I can't really comment on that).

Electronics has gotten cheaper, but a lot less DIY.

The UK had a huge DIY computing, hifi, and music hardware scene in the 70s and 80s. Even with DIY, the products weren't as cheap as they are today. But the DIY element made them more accessible than professional equipment, and far more educational.

For reasons I don't understand [1], only the UK and US had this scene. You can find copies of kit-promoting magazines like Electronics Today International online, and the Canadian and Australian issues were a lot less music-oriented than the UK editions.

Even Adafruit etc are lightweight compared to some of the 70s/80s DIY, which needed analog design skills and a willingness to build your own unsafe DIY power supplies.

[1] My guess is the UK had some very early synth startups like EMS and a solid hifi scene. When EMS folded some of their designers needed new work and there was enough interest in kit synths to keep them busy for a few years. Likewise with hifi.

Yeah I really miss the DIY aspect. But I wonder if that's partly down to electronics on the whole getting cheaper meaning there's a lot less people getting into DIY as a cheaper route into the scene.

That said, I have also noticed the brands have largely won the consumer war and people seem far more willing to drop cash into Apple / Sony / Samsung / etc because their hardware has a desirable aesthetics. However that might also be a symptom of the electronics industry going mainstream.

> For reasons I don't understand [1], only the UK and US had this scene.

Germany has had (and still has) it as well.

NL did too, Belgium and France did too. You couldn't walk two blocks without stumbling across an electronics parts store.

Elektuur, now called Elektor, was popular in central Europe in the 70s.

The ham radio people and strictly non-ham radio people like to pretend the other doesn't exist although they do nearly the same hobby, and amateur radio is much larger, more active, and richer (in the sense of more stuff and more expensive capable stuff) ... Funkamateur from Germany and some title in kanji that I can't enter on this keyboard from the Japan Amateur Radio League have been published for most of a century and are pretty active.

There is an uncanny valley effect. German schematic diagrams are full of "R" as a decimal place, rare in the 80s metric prefixes (cut it out with the nanofarads plz) and swapping periods and commas in long numbers. And there was something unusual about European scientific notation that I don't remember.

Also there is more total electronic hobby and electronic kit activity and sales now than at any time in history, despite endless accurate yet misleading claims that since the death of the Heathkit company no individual company has come close to monopolizing 90% of kit sales. No slice of the pie today is nearly as large as heathkits slice of the pie, but the pie overall is vastly larger.

There was also Heathkit, which sold built-it-yourself kits for all kinds of electronics. Stereos, amateur radio gear, televisions, multimeters and oscilloscopes, etc.

Our family got a IBM PCjr, in 1991. We couldn't afford a new PC, but I am thankful we had the PCjr because it sparked an interest in programming in me. If we had a new one that could play cool games I might not have gotten the programming bug so early.

> ...but certainly in my middle class life in the 1970's there was no money for buying teenagers a bedroom full of electronics.

While I'll agree with all the other responses that electronics have gotten a lot cheaper, I think there's another compounding factor. Back in the day, I think far more adults were dismissive of this sort of technology (or were personally unfamiliar to the point that they didn't see the value). So for kids, not having much money of their own, it was always an uphill struggle to justify the expense of any of it.

Today's adults were the kids from back then, and so are not as dismissive. So they do see the value, and are likely far more willing to spend the money.

I would say this is a mostly true comment, but it assumes that the author (or their parents) paid for everything. Many people are willing to trade their time (and leisure) to scavenge parts like those in the author's post, and needn't be rich.

To be more accurate, you're not making a useful point. You're just complaining about the way you grew up.

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