Random musings: 80s hardware, cyberdecks | Hacker News Reader

Random musings: 80s hardware, cyberdecks

strangelyentangled.com

39 pointsspeckx19 comments

Reminds me of when I visited Huaqiangbei for the first time in 2024. I had a vision of a cyberpunk tech market full of unique, hacked-together gizmos and gadgets, and was very disappointed to find that every stall sold the same knockoff airpods, electric air blowers, and discount drones. I would have been ecstatic to stumble upon some underground cyberdeck shop there, but alas, just worse quality versions of the same stuff you could find at Best Buy.

Having made several cyberdecks over the years and run the whole Pelican case thread longer than ideal, it has been about making custom one-off builds. There are really no limits other than attention span, budget, and design/build skills. I've seen some held together with hot glue that are just as cool as others from those with access to CNC facilities. Personally, they have been a great vehicle for me to push my boundaries in 3D printing and get from Tinkercad to Fusion 360, having fun the entire time.

(of course a plug for https://doscher.com)

I first encountered cyberdecks a while ago and thought they were a fun idea for hacking about but more recently I've started seeing videos of beginners making them by cramming raspberry pis into random cases salvaged from second hand shops.

It's been really cool to see people creating hardware without worrying about the usual limitations of soldering or 3d printing. Some have more technical ability than others and have salvaged screens or other bits from random electronics.

It feels like a rediscovery of hacker ethos without the slightly toxic baggage of maker culture.

What is "the slightly toxic baggage of maker culture"? One of the things about modern life that seems most toxic to me - and I'm guessing you'd agree - is that our interactions with technology are so heavily skewed toward consumption, not creation, and what creation there is is overwhelmingly in the service of a desperate desire for fleeting online attention. If there is a toxic side to "maker culture," how can we ameliorate it and emphasize the fun, learning, and agency?

Mostly that "Makers" would best be described as "Geeks who missed shop class", and that they should understand that there were reasons for pretty much every aspect of traditional work, and that their facility with computers/technology does _not_ make them more knowledgeable possible approaches than folks who did this for a living in the past.

I like the look of them, but have never understood what people actually use them for.

Generally, they don't use them for anything. Kind of cyberpunk LARPing or something.

They actually have a purpose, if you're in a role where you need to interface with a lot electro-mechanical stuff of varying vintage though. Basically ends up being a pelican case with a fat battery, a small network with short patch cables for reconfiguration on the go, two SBCs running windows IOT and linux, a PLC + 2/3 I/O cards, a CAN adapter and some space for 6 inches of terminal block on a DIN rail. Then a keyboard + monitor.

Maybe not as sexy as some people make but it is a cyberdeck/briefcase lab and it will allow you probe most distressed machines without having to waste time running around for supplies or back and forth to offices.

The way many manufacturers are structured however, there is too much red-tape and osha for this to be a reality for a lot of people, at least in the usa. It does exist in some places though.

That’s exactly what they’re supposed to be. The Flipper Zero is also a type of cyberdeck.

the rest of it makes sense but what's the PLC for?

Super Evil Shit™: https://www.controleng.com/throwback-attack-an-insider-relea...

More generally, there's a vast world of civil / industrial infrastructure controlled and monitored by SCADA / PLC networks - boring stuff, city scale water and sewerage, mineral processing plants, refineries, port loading, reserve tanks, pipelines, etc.

Regular technicians carry cyberdecks / portable work units that speak PLC alongside ethernet.

Speaking only for myself, I'd love to have a modern netbook with great battery life and a decent keyboard. I'd carry that around with me all the time to hack on random bits of code or whatever when the mood strikes.

If I weren't completely tired of waiting for iPadOS to grow a Terminal.app, an iPad mini with a keyboard folio case would be nearly my ideal portable computer. For functionality, I'd vastly prefer something in that form factor that only supported text mode of something that had a beautiful GUI but no terminal. At least I could run emacs and fish shell there, and that'd cover 98% of my on-the-go needs.

Super bonus points if you can make the thing look cool at the same time, but that's just icing on the cake.

My impression is, that movement it's more about having a modern accessory. All the videos I've seen so far are about look, not technology, purpose or actual usage; thus I label them fashion-deck. Kinda strange, but maybe something more will grow from this.

Yeah, it's a fun, retro aesthetic; but I also care about having computers on my person that are genuinely useful for things I want to do, just as my smartphone is useful.

I hadn't heard of "cyberdecks" until a month ago, but the term seems to have first become popular in November 2020: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=cyberdeck&date=all&geo=U...

I think it's probably older than that, related to "cyberspace decks" in William Gibson's Neuromancer which was written in the early 80s on a 50-year-old mechanical typewriter.

Yes and then in the TTRPG Shadowrun

Cyberdecks were featured prominently in video game Cyberpunk 2077 - the 2020 and 2023 spikes may have been caused by that game, and the subsequent expansion.

fyi https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cyberdeck&year...

(I'd like to know who was using "cyberdeck" in 1976)

Ok, I see - it's a consequence of the smoothing function used in the graph. First actual use is 1979.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com