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Comment by jacurtis | Hacker News Reader

This is a really cool concept. Computers are getting so advanced now that many of us spend our hours fighting about performance differences of Intel vs AMD vs Apple Silicon, without even fully understanding how a computer works. The glory days of hacking together a computer are seemingly gone, but this product appears to attempt to bring that back and I embrace it.

I signed up to get notified. I think the $99 pricepoint is extremely reasonable. Even if this ends up being a project you complete over a single weekend. There's a lot to learn here.

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To that end, Elements of Computing Systems (not as fun of a name) really did it for me.

I recommend it every chance I get.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/elements-computing-systems

That book is a gem! And the related website has additional good stuff: https://www.nand2tetris.org/

The Pattern on the Stone is also excellent, especially for audiences less familiar with computers. It has always struck me as a paramount example of "education" in that it shares relative illumination in a very digestible format. I wish I'd read it years earlier.

Charles Petzold’s ‘Code’ is a masterpiece.

There’s a second edition coming out after all this time: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262539802

Estimated July 6 next year

Yes. I'm reminded of old cars from the 70's or earlier. You look under the hood and it's all understandable, accessible. Distributor, battery, spark plug wires, radiator, radiator hoses — not much else aside from the engine.

Modern car?

It's nice to look under the hood of an old computer and enjoy understanding how it all works.

Full-time driver? Well, airbags, crumple zone, ABS brakes were all added for a reason....

Nice to have a hobby car in the garage though to tinker with, take out on Sundays.

What kind of car?

This is why working on motorcycles such a breath of fresh air. The bike I own has the most advance compute ton it as the trip meter. It’s carbureted and thoroughly mechanical. But even better is the fact that on a motorcycle you can get at everything relatively easily. I went from barely knowing where the coolant goes in to rebuilding an engine in about 3 years and that’s a really empowering feeling.

Complexity is starting to go that way with bikes too, and I suspect euro 4 & euro 5. Plenty of drive-by-wire bikes now, with IMUs and other tricky bits, and some of the few really simple ones remaining (new) wont' make the new emissions standards (e.g. moto-guzzi is getting more complex).

But you are right, if you stay away from the performance engines there is a lot you can do, and it's easy to get at.

It wasn't that long ago that you could, if you knew where to look, easily find lots of PC parts for absolutely free... and I recommended that as the go-to for general computing experimentation, as it was a well-documented platform with plenty of software available, but now it seems "retrocomputing" is popular again and people will pay a surprisingly large amount for these older systems.

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