The Hobby Computer Culture
technicshistory.com
technicshistory.com
As part of my 'rent' I could help out by entering numbers or verifying numbers for him. I discovered that his portfolio was worth more than $4M and I asked him why he was working at IBM if he was "rich". His answer was that he enjoyed working at IBM, you could just "spend" stock as you would lose out on future growth, and what would he do with his time if he wasn't working? The one conceit he admitted was that his house was paid for so he didn't have to pay a mortgage and that meant he had more disposable income every month.
That was a pretty amazing for me at that age.
The other random factoid was that for 10 years I was President of the "Home Brew Robotics Club" (which is still going on) and it was a direct outgrowth of the Home Brew Computer Club. It was started by Dick Prather as a "SIG" or Special Interest Group where HBCC members who were interested in using their computers with robots would meet and exchange ideas and such.
In a world so full of interesting, wonderful and curious things, I will never understand people who can't think of anything to do if they didn't have a job. Money is usually a limiting factor, but it sounds like it might not have been for this person.
What are the nearest equivalents today?
Let me ask you a question and perhaps it will help?
What if there was something wonderful and curious that you could explore and someone else would actually pay you money while you were exploring that thing?
I've met a number of folks in research who "work" at a University doing their research and even though the pay sucks love what they are doing. You could pay them nothing and they would still love doing it. They might be forced to do something else if they didn't have enough money to live on, but even if they had millions and millions they wouldn't be doing anything differently.
Keith, the guy I was renting the room from, was in the latter position. He didn't "have" to work, and didn't "have" to work at IBM to work on computers, but in doing so he got to satisfy his curiosity and got to work on much better equipment than if he were funding it himself. Is that something understandable?
FWIW, in the Bay Area we call this "failing" at retirement :-) Failing is in quotes because if you choose to go back to work is it really a failure? Had a great conversation with Guido von Rossum when he decided to 'un-retire' and go "work" for Microsoft. There are a lot of things to like about the office, a community, a continual stream of interesting problems to solve, Etc. And knowing that if you didn't like it you can just stop really helps in dealing with people who would attempt to assert power over you.
The days of patronage are basically over; no one pays you real money to explore anymore. Corporations only pay you money to exert your brain towards some goal. There may be an exploration phase but well over half the work will be the grind of bugfixing and maintenance (or equivalent in other fields) that is the actual reason for your employment.
And if you passion is something completely different then that can be the case too. A executive I met at IBM retired and has gone head first into their actual passion which is art history. They didn't major in it at school or try to get a job in it because those jobs didn't pay them what they wanted but now that they are retired they are spending their time in libraries and museums all over the place digging into the nuances of various bits of art. Are they "working"? Yes in the sense that they are doing the same thing they would have done if someone had hired an art history major apparently :-).
But for non-technical people, getting paid by a corporation to work on your hobby is mostly impossible, no matter how important the problem is. No company is going to fund things which are deemed important yet don’t make anyone money directly.
I wonder why I haven't heard back....
Unfortunately, it turns out that the problem of picking the right person to donate to is a very hard one.
And the amounts of money involved might be on the low end of your expectations.
I try to do some interesting stuff including going to some selected events (who will mostly comp my attendance) in locations I can do some other activities in conjunction.
The latter part of this is irrelevant if you’re rich.
I have no issue with someone who is rich who chooses to do what most other people consider work.
The issue I have is someone who says, “What would I do if I wasn’t working?” Figure it out. You’ve got infinite options. Consider enough of them to be confident in your choice.
If you’re just defaulting to “working” because you haven’t really tried anything else, that’s what I don’t get.
> I discovered that his portfolio was worth more than $4M and I asked him why he was working at IBM if he was "rich". His answer was that he enjoyed working at IBM, you could just "spend" stock as you would lose out on future growth, and what would he do with his time if he wasn't working?
People keep all sorts of things to themselves unless asked and even when asked.
[1] Some did of course and the contrast was super stark, why live your life antagonizing those less fortunate than you? It's a choice but I never felt it was a healthy one.
If you're a curious person with average or better intelligence you'll never be bored.
and a social environment. "belonging" is a very important human need.
This guy got to do it AND got paid.
Might not have, but still could have been. Chances are that, in 1978 at IBM, he had the opportunity to work with hardware that he couldn’t afford to buy.
Similarly, today, a millionaire might choose to stay in a job at SpaceX because it’s the only way they can afford to work with truly big rockets.
It'd be a bit like working at Google and being really interested in the internet at a time when it wasn't essentially an alternative to consulting for upper-middle class college grads.
Fortunately, a fair number of people who came to the club knew more than I did about our computer and computers in general. I acquired much of my early computer knowledge from those people as well as getting my first two programming jobs through club contacts despite having no resume or computer-specific education. Eventually the club grew to several hundred people, became a registered non-profit corporation and had a volunteer board of directors (who were all older and more experienced than I was about, well - almost everything). I describe myself as a "self-taught programmer" but a good part of that was also being informally 'club-taught' because I had people to ask when I got stuck. They may not have always had the answer but hearing how they thought through solving it was also an education.
I can trace back my entire life-long career as an (eventually) successful serial entrepreneur in desktop computer-centric software and hardware to that club I naively started 45 years ago - and I still have five close friends I met at the club despite all of us moving across the country and around the world several times. And each of those friends has gone on to have notably interesting and productive computer-related careers too.
I was talking to someone and explaining that I was taking classes at a local community college in preparation for computer science degree and mentioned off-hand that I might try to find some part-time Linux/BSD sysadmin work at some point. (I never fully attained the degree but also ended up not needing it.) The owner of a local IT consulting business overheard me and called me up the next day. I worked for him for a while and the next three jobs I moved to after that were all based on referrals and recommendations from people in that group.
To anyone unfamiliar, which is probably most people, OS-9 was a multi-user multi-tasking operating system which ran on 6809 CPUs. While not a UNIX, it was similar enough that the transition to SunOS was smooth.
To this day, I still alias "ls -la" to "dire", which comes from my muscle memory of typing "dir -e" in OS-9!
I have a feeling that we live in times of over-commercialization. Today, if you build something, the first criticism you'll hear is, "I can get something cheaper that is mass-produced in China." The second thing you'll hear is, "How do you monetize this?".
I think this puts a huge damper on innovation, especially among hobbyists.
I'm not sure it's all necessarily about over-commercialization, but it might be over-globalization.
We're obviously going through a timeline of the US trying to roll back globalized supply chains, and we don't know how that will end, but the one benefit it gave Americans cheap stuff at a cost of that production happening in the US. The benefit of cheap stuff will slowly be eradicated in the name of providing more job security in the US (at least, that's the plan - many are not convinced it makes much economic sense).
Everyone has benefited in some way from globalization (cheaper stuff means more economic utility), but we've also faced economic peril: off-shoring work means there is less work available near by. This is obviously true of blue collar work, but I think most people in the tech industry are familiar with Indian, Eastern European and Philippine companies taking work too.
In most of the West, there seems to have been an assumption that the West would become dominated by "knowledge workers" - all work would move to white collar professional office-bound, screen-based work - while the dirty and hard work of turning base materials into useful products, the blue collar stuff, would move off-shore. Within white collar work, the West would become more "managerial", more strategic, less productive in a tactical sense.
This idea isn't entirely new. Slavery and multiple empires were predicated on similar ideas, and while off-shoring isn't exactly modern slavery, the idea of paying poor people very little money so we can benefit does feel philosophically aligned, shall we say.
It's left us in a place where most people - both in the West and in those countries with off-shored work, and at very work layer from the hardest manual labour all the way up to managerial, perhaps even executive, levels - are worried about their economic future.
How can you have time for hobbies when you're worried about surviving the next 5 years?
This means people are now, more than ever, looking for things that raise their own utility - can I earn more money, and can I buy things cheaper? If you're doing something that doesn't move the needle on one or both of those sides of the equation, you start to feel like you're being left behind and the World is going to eat your lunch, and maybe you and your family too.
In that context, there's not much space for hobbies. Hobbies were a luxury only the affluent could afford hundreds of years ago and as wealth inequality rises again after decades of historic lows, the anxiety is starting to chip away through the middle classes and into the working classes again, so that hobbies won't exist again for many people over the next 20 or 30 years.
And yes, it does harm innovation. Most scientific and technological advancements of the last 500 years were started by people having the time to muck about with things, either as a hobby or as a paid vocation in a research lab or academic setting. That's potentially going away bit by bit. Curiosity has limited value in the future, as it becomes an extravagance few have time or resource for. Many people are subconsciously or even consciously asking themselves: if something doesn't lower a price on things I'm buying or increase the money I can get for what I'm selling, and it can't do that now, why do I care?
It's incredibly sad.
One huge advantage they have is its comparatively dirt cheap to make mistakes and turn another revision. With the tariffs, this more than doubles for the American trying to also make things. When mistakes cost 2-3x, less people are going to take risks. We've been so focused on what we can turn into intellectual property that we lose focus on what we can make.
The benefit of less enforced IP is that designs can be taken and iterated on freely while in the world of strong IP, you get what the company has decided is the product.
So we can observe a low-risk, lowish reward system that rewards continuous improvement over stagnation. I have a bad feeling that we're doubling and tripling down on this to move towards a world where we can only access computing through the narrow lens that the IP holders will allow.
Shameless plug: if you like his stuff, you might also like my book, "Exploding The Phone", which is a history of phone phreaking. https://explodingthephone.com/
Evan narrated the Audible version. :-)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I remember looking at lots of the add in the back of all the magazines and comic books (and paperbacks) being amazed at all the stuff on offer. Just send a check or money order and get you own ...
Then in the 1990's with internet commerce getting started I remember a lot of skepticism with comments like "who would send money to someone they have never met".
No drawing any conclusions here, just looking back and seeing similarities and changes.
My kids were quite amazed when they found my copy of a book whose approximate title was _Specialty Mail Order Catalogs_, which is apparently so obscure I'm not finding it on Goodreads or Abebooks --- will have to check the ISBN the next time it comes up and add it to the former.
But in those days, there were the trade magazines on the newsstand, the electronics shops and clubs where guys hung out to talk about calculators and radios and jukeboxes and pinball machines.
It looks like MITS was already into calculators and model rocketry. And getting featured on the cover of Popular Electronics gave them a boost. Undoubtedly, plenty of ads in the back for mail-order kits, and then you'd be signed up for ever-more specialized company catalogs.
It was the same when I collected vinyl records and built computers. Find the right trade magazines and the crusty old guys tending storefronts, and you could learn about the next big thing.
Of course there were also comic books sold to gullible children with catalogs and ads in the back pages. Snapping gum, whoopee cushions, spy cameras, and X-ray Specs. You could count on being disappointed by purchasing something on that list, but it was often a matter of clever misrepresentation by marketing blurbs and a sketch.
One night 8-year-old me phoned in an order for a "remote control hovercraft". It came "collect-on-delivery" which Mom didn't like. The hovercraft was not radio-controlled as I had imagined. It had a flashlight-like handle that held 2x "D" cells and a motor that rotated a thin cable. The cable stretched several feet to a "hovercraft" with a light plastic hull and fan blades. So you could walk it around the room like a marionette as the downdraft held it suspended a little bit.
Only a few years later, I began receiving mail from AARP. The hovercraft sellers had sold them my address and pseudonym. We could tell, because the hovercraft-selling lady had misspelled my first name. Good times.
I had one of those, though I knew what I was getting (from Edmund Scientific Catalog).
That's miles apart from some fly by night catalogue with ads from Jim Bob selling what was only a decades prior the domain of science fiction and corporate offices.
Like look at it another way. If some fly by night website was selling what they claimed was a desktop replicator for $5000 and someone posted it on Hackernews the top comment would be about how the website isn't responsive and the language is in broken english and somewhere towards the bottom would be a flame war started by some curious person saying "I'm gonna go for it. I just bought it."
MITS was not unknown, but they were not a household name. And any microcomputer at that time was quite an expensive toy. Costing an amount that a lot of people could not really afford to just lose.
FWIW, this etymology is incorrect. The American Craftsman architecture style was a derivative of the British Arts & Crafts movement, post Victorian era.
Timeline is roughly: Arts & Crafts circa 1880, American Craftsman circa 1900.
The Sears Craftsman brand was created in 1927.
Interesting article on it: https://medium.com/@madmedic11671/forgotten-fraud-world-powe...
Obviously he misremembered the name. I wasn't able to find other references to corroborate more details of the scam, but of course now I know that I wasn't searching for the correct name.
It feels like the era of the personal computer ended around the turn of the century though.
When OpenSCAD was first released, I finally had a 3D modeling environment which made sense to me.
When the Shapeoko was first announced on Kickstarter (which made use of the opensource projects Arduino, Grbl, and Makerslide, and was iself initially opensource) I finally had a robotic shop assistant which allowed me to make pretty much anything I wanted w/o the need to make myriad fixtures and jigs or to limit myself to traditional joinery techniques.
When Python was added to OpenSCAD as: https://pythonscad.org/ I finally had a programming environment which allowed not just 3D modeling but also mutable variables _and_ the ability to write out files so as to make DXFs or G-code.
So, I am working on:
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
and have been using it for my personal projects for a while now --- hopefully I will have a suitably intricate project ready to function as a showcase for its capabilities in a month or so.
> We were slaves to the mainframe! [Diffie] said. Dumb terminals! That's all we had. We were powerless under the big machine's unyielding central control. Then we escaped to the personal computer, autonomous, powerful. Then networks. The PC was soon rendered to be nothing but a "thin client," just a browser with very little software residing on our personal machines, the code being on network servers, which are under the control of administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net, our machines having become dumb terminals again.
Applications like yours claw back a little of that power. Very nice.
[1]:https://archive.org/details/life-in-code-a-personal-history-...
Yeah, I've never understood how folks who managed to escape from the schackles of mainframe central computing are willing to ease into the padded cell afforded by cloud computing.
On the other hand I was thinking something similar with smartphones and look how that ended up.
And now look where we are at, we allowed impersonal institutions to use them against us.
Neither of those matches the store that I remember patronizing circa 1978 or so, to buy a California Computer Systems S-100 box. That would have been on El Camino just north of Grant Road, circa 80 W El Camino.
The 'hobby' computers were no to be found in any 'regular' shop, but sold in what would now probably be called 'pop-ups' run by an enthusiast from his front room.
There was no software to be found, so you programmed everything yourself not for utility but simply for the joy of programming.
There were no standard architectures in the space, not even in terms of display or input. You had things like the Newton with a single line led display, the ZX81 with a membrame 'keyboard' or the Vic-20 with real video out (mostly PAL for europe).
You'ld travel with a little kaggle of friends to a regional 'hobby computer expo', which meant the region's pop-up store owners each had one or two computers set up on a table in some school's gym, and stare in awe at the 'advanced graphics' of the precursor of the BBC Micro that could display the (static) television test card in 8 bit.
https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-showsto...
When DARPA started funding the addition (by Berkeley CS Dept) of a TCP/IP stack to Unix in 1980, hobbyist culture was about 2 years into the start of its experimentation with the BBS. Specifically, according to Google Gemini, "The very first [BBS] for personal computers, named CBBS (Computerized Bulletin Board System), officially went online on February 16, 1978".
It is interesting to notice how the Unix design filtered down to hobbyists. Bell Labs started sharing Unix (at first, only with other elite institutions) and one reason the decision makers at the corporation (AT&T) that owned Bell Labs was willing to sign off on the sharing was that they had little hope of ever making any significant money from Unix because AT&T had entered into an agreement with the government that it would not enter the computer market. (At the same time, IBM agreed that it would not enter the telecommunications market. The thinking of the government was that each megacorporation was a monopolist or near-monopolist in its market, which would give it an unfair advantage in entering related markets.) Because of this sharing, it was on Richard Stallman's radar in 1983 when he chose to model his GNU system on Unix. Note that at the time Stallman was also an employee of an elite institution (MIT's AI Lab).
Richard Stallman free-software movement was the main force driving the Unix design into the hands of the hobbyists, but it took almost a decade for it to do that. When David Cutler arrived at Microsoft in October 1988 to start the NT project, Unix was still mainly associated with elite institutions.
In 1978 I bought a Tandy Model I. In 1979 I joined a friend and we started our own firm. Before the end of 1980 our firm was using my Model I to track attorney time and send detailed billing statements to business clients. By 1984 Compaq computers had replaced every electric typewriter in my firm and were running billing software I had written together with detailed Wordperfect scripts I wrote that automated combining database lookups into legal forms.
No other firms had anything like it. Of course, that changed very rapidly. I have always regretted not having the balls to leave my law practice to commercialize my software - but I had to put food on the table. Nevertheless, computing has been the love of my life to this very day where, in retirement, all I do is tinker with my home network playing around with linux.
As a former JavaScript developer and a hiring manager who conducts interviews I would never hire a JavaScript developer who has not completed and published a personal application. To be very clear I don't care what your past titles are. You are not a senior developer if you have not written an application. You are not a leader, or team lead, if you have not managed people.
Byte gradually lost page count over the years... May 1991 was 388 pages, while Oct. 1995 was 250.
BYTE was a little less obnoxious about it, and the quality of the writing was superb. I got it occasionally as a teenager in the UK and always looked forward to it, because the information density was insane. I have the "Best of BYTE" book, and often dip into it as a comforting, sentimental read. I really do wish a magazine like it existed today.
The other classic, risible, software discussion were hackers suggesting writing a recipe database program. Typically to keep their (typically female) partner from condemning their hobby as a waste of time.
WHAT? That was true even well into the 1980s.
A vivid memory was being in a computer shop when a young accountant pulled up in his Trans Am and declared to the salesperson, "I need a Visicalc" --- once it was explained that this was a program for a computer and that one would be needed, the guy was set up with an order of basically one of everything in the store:
- Apple ][ w/ 80 column card and matching green monitor
- disk controller and dual disk drives
- 132 column printer
and of course a copy of Visicalc and a couple of books on using a PC all of which was then loaded up into his Trans Am and he drove off into the sunset --- always wondered how that worked out....
In the late 80's/early 90's I was working for a little electronics manufacturer that also sold Color Computer software. I remember all the phone calls and letters asking for support and there was one lady in particular whose complete address I remembered because she wrote us so often, trying to get her Digitizer working. She was finally successful and pasted a scanned photo of her daughter in a cowboy hat into her final thank-you letter :-)
One of the lessons that stuck with me all these years is that quality of product documentation/ease of use is inversely proportional to the number of support calls I had to take.
That was really touching. Thank you for sharing.
“Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets us to the thing.”