Ask HN: Did students lose interest in electronics as a hobby in the early 80s? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Did students lose interest in electronics as a hobby in the early 80s?

18 pointsamichail27 comments

It's hard to imagine how electronics could compete with computer programming as a hobby with the increasing popularity of home computers in the early 80s.

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I am from the 70s and my father did both electronics and software so I was raised with both. I think it really collapsed in the 90s but end 80s my university dropped many analog electronics courses for digital. That was enough to have new students not learn enough about electronics.

That's a shame in real terms of losses of future EEs, technicians, and hobbyists.

For countries worrying about remaining independent and competitive, there's too much of a monoculture and brain trust in too few locations: Taiwan, Huaqiangbei, Vietnam, and Malaysia. There ought to be every effort made to make electronics cool, accessible, and useful. 3D printing I think has helped carry this torch along some.

In other news, commercial electricians make comfortable middle-class salaries and are unlikely to be immediately threatened by automation.

everything moved towards surface mount components. These are a lot harder to work with than the through hole parts. Then a lot of manufacturing went to Japan/Korea/Taiwan and latterly to China. A quirk of US tax law said 'parts in inventory are carried at cost' and not depreciated. If you want to write them off, you must sell them. This meant that a company making 500,000 widgets, who had a bad sale year may end up with parts to make 50,000 widgets. The next year's design differs = parts useless to them = sold off cheap to used parts dealers(called 'surplus' = 100% good new parts), like Radio SHack and many others = lots of stuff. Now this business has collapse and you can only buy parts cheap on Ali-express, Ebay. New parts from Digikey are readily available in small/large amounts at the normal price. The best remnant in places like hacklab.to = a hackerspace with tools and 3D printers etc. Many libraries now put hacker spaces and internet cafes where they once dealt with books

We made abstractions successfully, world changing abstractions.

Do the NAND to Tetris course and see that tech is abstractions on top of abstractions. Electronics today is frequently represented by code. Check out Verilog or VHDL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_description_language

Where electronics stayed interesting is in the realm where code meets reality -> robotics and art.

Playing with LED's, robotics competitions, quad copters, cosplay. Maybe adjacent to SDR. Raspberry Pi's and Arduinos.

Check out ADAFruit: https://www.adafruit.com/

or Sparkfun: https://www.sparkfun.com/

Check out sites like: https://hackaday.com/

There is also the greater cultures: Maker culture and hacker culture. Maker Faire is super interesting and has many many attendees.

I would say that in America, it is harder to work with electronics because the number of maker spaces and places you could buy parts (RadioShack/Fry's) greatly diminished, but afluent folks can definitely have an electronics hobby supplied by online vendors.

(Disclaimer: This isn't my hobby, this is just my understanding)

In university, we used individual macro components in Altera's tools (ModelSim/Quartus) to construct a microcoded, superscalar, pipelined CPU with branch prediction. It was way more painful than Verilog but had a "visual programming" UX to it.

For a complete processor emulating the real world, there's OpenSPARC.

https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t2-pag...

I'm sure there are dozens of open core RISC-V implementations out there and maybe some ARM ones too.

Electronics as a hobby costs real money.

Software as a hobby costs nothing --- beyond a computer which everyone already has; hobbyist or not.

I think this question is specifically about the early 80's, although I think that argument is certainly relevant today.

Computers like Commodore 64 or Sinclair Spectrum were relatively affordable and available in the 80's. They disappeared in the early 90's (replaced by PC compatibles), that answer is only a few years off.

The TRS ("trash") 80 also.

Shout out to the Amiga: expensive, different, and interesting. Apple and Mac classic were 2 of those things.

Computers were not cheap in the 80s. However, my father, who did a lot of electronics projects in the 80s did pivot to computers and it changed my life.

I remember going to the independent computer stores of Silicon Valley. There were many enterprising Asian rim immigrant merchants selling components from jewelry display cases.

For hardware, there was WeirdStuff (large bin of SPA shareware on dot-matrix print labeled floppies), Halted/HSC (used and new electronic parts and odds-and-end), JDR microdevices (when commercial engineers needed real tools and parts), and Radio ("Rat") Shack.

Retail software: the original Fry's Electronics branched out, NCA Peripherals, and Egghead Software. Later, the CompUSA tech hypermart came along and squished most of the independent stores and regional chains. Micro Center was one that endured. PixelUSA in Campbell always had the latest in prosumer DIY computer gear. Central Computer Systems (CSS) is less of cramped computer parts hypermart that is more of a convenience store; they also had almost every free and paid computer magazine and semi-commercial open source media distributions from Slackware to Red Hat (pre-Enterprise) Linux.

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Electronics. My dad was an electrical and A/C mechanic who got started with HeathKit with his father, who was also a mechanic.

My dad was too impatient and not interested in teamwork or doing things together.

From a young age, I knew generally the fundamentals of how passives (RLC), current, voltage, motors, and safety around electricity. I had the gray plastic front Science Fair 200-in-1 kit.

Your timing is a bit off--electronics went down in the early 90s.

It was microprocessors and then the IBM PC that dented electronics.

Note the difference in Popular Electronics from 1976 to 1982 to 1993:

https://archive.org/details/popularelectroni10unse_3

https://archive.org/details/PopularElectronics/PopularElectr...

Eletronics went from "components only" to "components and software" and that's much more difficult. You can't just "tinker" anymore once software enters the picture. There's an extra abstraction level that requires a lot more work with no reward to get over and that unfortunately filters a lot of people out.

I didn’t know much about electronics and still don’t know much to this day. There were certainly electronics parts stores at the time whereas today they’ve all closed. Acquiring parts online has made things easier and there is a lot more choice of parts and lower prices today. I was and still am more interested in computer programming.

The decline of HeathKit and also the decline of anything related to blue-collar as "low status".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit

99% of modern Americans can't do anything for themselves.

One reason is complexity: with a computer it is easy to go more and more complex, while with electronics it is not - one is very limited in what you can build without going to pay a lot on parts and equipment and even then you are still limited in what you can do.

And there is the limitation in what you can do with it: with a computer you can do various apps (like a notepad, phonebook), some music (Commodore 64 SID was limited, but still fun), some graphics, games etc. With electronics you can do ... how much?

And the time spent on playing games means less time to play with electronics. Time is limited.

I was a kid during this time.

My recollection is that electronics, the school electronics lab, and the people there, were even nerdier than the software equivalents, and also much 'stricter', already well-established and less accessible, whereas software was a new country, open for exploration, with stories in the press of kids making fortunes on video games, etc.

Also that the electronics industry was being completely taken over by the Asian economies.

I remember RadioShack in the 90s? and my father gifted me a "Science Fair 60 in One Electronic Project Lab"[1] so, no I think it lasted a bit longer than perhaps you remember. I agree with anonzzzies' timeline.

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=science+fair+60+in+one+elect...

Integrated circuits weren't as accessible; you had to find the data sheet, if you weren't careful you could fry expensive chips easy. Computers were actually hard to damage with software.

You could rip up old electronics for discrete components and make use of them; IC's were much more difficult to salvage for reuse. And yet those were rapidly where all the fun was.

The gateway drug to electronics was often Ham radio; many of its benefits / affordances were better addressed by networking.

Schools were one reason. My high school canceled electronics classes in favor of programming, which was seen as a job for the future. I'm sure money and safety also figured into that decision.

I think it was more that radio shack stopped carrying hobby books and electronics parts for the most part after the 90s.

The people that are best with equations and problem-solving were always the ones who did the electronics, whether hobbyist or professional. Computers, too but mainframes were too big to own your own and do whatever you wanted to with it. So no computer hobbyists until computers became personal, and not that many until affordable, then no surge until surplus was available.

Electronic hobbyists did not surge until surplus components became abundantly available after WWII themselves.

There's always only been so many of these enthusiasts.

Once Ataris and Commodores got popular mainly for gaming, I watched the promising young geeks and nerds who would have gravitated to natural science fields choose computers instead.

In the early '80's it was easy to forsee this eventuality so I doubled down on natural science myself.

Electronic hobbyists who build from components didn't dwindle to insignificance because Radio Shacks all over the US closed down, Radio Shack closed because there were not enough hobbyists coming along any more.

I did when I got an Apple ][+. Barely picked up my soldering iron again.

viam.com has the potential to re-ignite that passion for this generation.

This appears to be yet another company trying to monetize the robotics education space. What they offer seems shallow to me.

viam.com has the potential to reignite that passion for this generation.

I experienced that and enjoyed electronics because I had far more power to create physical things that I found exciting. If you're into making gadgets and machines and robots and all that, computers weren't enough on their own or even any use at all.

Nowadays, it's a bit murkier because you can use single board computers with pre-made modules for interfacing with the real world and assemble a gadget with almost no application of electronics knowledge and mostly just software.

It might have helped that I didn't have any of the latest computers and electronics in the 80s so it was empowering to see that I could make things at a similar level of technology to the old 2nd hand and cheap commercial products I had around. I remember being very disappointed with digital watches because they were so opaque having an inaccessible COB blob doing all the interesting work.

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