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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

Yes and no. Not to be cliche, but times are different. Everything now is digital, so all of the fun we used to have with the analog stuff is just gone. You could open up an electronic thing and look at the parts, borrow the parts, modify/replace the parts, etc. Sure, some of these things were litterally the size of the desktop, but lots of learning was had by many a hacker.

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I fell in love with computers by wasting hours messing with Windows settings and internals. Thinking now, it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of space for that sort of stuff in most people’s routines, especially if they’re stuck in a browsing wheel of boredom. My wheel right now is just Reddit and HN and back and forth, and it’s insanely difficult to unhinge myself from it.

Just install some Linux distro (preferably not something like Ubuntu but something more "bare"/"raw") and start tinkering. I feel there are more tinkers into Linux nowadays than there were PC/Mac tinkers regardless of OS back in the 90s.

Of course computers (including mobiles and tablets) became widely mainstream over the years so the percentage of tinkers dropped but the absolute numbers increased.

OK then, grab a Raspberry Pi 3B, 4B and Zero, pop open these docs for config.txt, and try and figure out how far you can push each of these tiny machines: https://www.elinux.org/RPiconfig

Really though, the RPi's config.txt is exactly this kind of rabbit hole. I just got a Zero W today and now I'm thinking about if it's possible to underclock it enough to power it with a lemon battery via GPIO.

If you do the latter, will you please write about it and share here?

That was a joke. Was.

According to this video I’d need a wall of lemons to get 5V with support for 300mA of current: https://youtu.be/a1D-fZP8qJk?t=205

So it may take some... adjustments... to get something like this to work, but I’ll see what I can do.

I have more fun with Arduino type boards than RPis. For me, RPis are just fun to see where you can put a little computer, but I like all of the soldering, bread boarding, wiring, etc of the various shields in the Arduino realm. I get the best of both worlds with the analog/digital inputs, plus the programming in a very limited (requires some creativity) fooprint type of challenge. I haven't messed with the GPIOs on a RPi though, but now we're back to just programming in whatever unsconstrained/unrestricted way of a desktop. ??? we all like different things.

The downside of embedded system is it eventually turns into enterprise hardware. A RPi is just a small cheap PC now.

If you don't step away from it everything eventually becomes enterprise software.

It ever wasn't?

It used to have significantly more performance problems, but it's always followed the basic form of "tiny PC with IO pins and overbearing GPU".

> Yes and no. Not to be cliche, but times are different. Everything now is digital

What did your elders who grew up with books and radios say of the early computers era you’re fond of?

There has never been as many books as today.

A book still smells like a book.

You can still buy beautiful books.

In fact, I don't see the difference between the books from my youth and the books now as an adult.

But the IT field is certainly very different.

However, I don't miss the old modems, the hacks to get my maxtor working, clone CD and emule. I don't miss the floppy, black and white low res monitor, the clunky hardware and the slow or no internet.

I like HD. I like thin laptops, WIFI, USB, bittorrent, and a usable linux desktop.

I do have nostalgia for how the discovery of the old internet felt, the sense of community, the ethics and dreams. But it doesn't mean the current one is not awesome.

My elders where in contstruction with fairly low pay for lots of physical work. So my elders saw my interest in electronics and afforded me every opportunity to do something not in the same line of work they endured. That included buying me books to further my studies. They also bought me electronic toys knowing that once I got "bored" with the toy, I would at some point be opening it up to see what made it tick.

There are all sorts of electronics besides computers. A CPU is a very small shrunken sets of transistors that are too small for anyone to interact with other than through software (realistically that is). However, older "computer" devices used components large enough you could see and manipulate by hand. The traces on the boards were large enough you could physically scratch/break, and re-wire (reprogramming) causing the device to do something new. To the point, at some stage, stickers reading "No user servicable parts inside" became a thing so people would stop tinkering. That sticker has now been replaced with an apple shaped logo, but they pretty much mean the same thing now.

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