Publishing Schematics Before “Open Source” Was a Word | Hacker News Reader

Publishing Schematics Before “Open Source” Was a Word

fabscene.medium.com

Most electrical/electronic items (radios, TVs, washing machines, ...) used to come with a schematic, or at least a block diagram, inside the device. Similarly, published integrated circuit data sheets contained enough information to understand how the chip worked to a low-level. This changed around the 80s from memory? There wasn't a word for "open source" in electronics, as it was just the unnamed default. It was all paper based, as it predated wide-spread online distribution.

Some test instruments still come with "theory of operation" documentation. Those are tons of fun to read.

My parents bought a relatively inexpensive television in 1987 and it came with complete schematics, printed out as an addendum to the user manual. I was more excited about those than the TV itself because I had just learned to read schematics from one of the Forrest Mims books at Radio Shack a few months earlier. This was in the US and I am pretty sure it was made by Emerson.

A dumb brand name dryer we got from Home Depot a few years back still has one of these. It was a breath of fresh air to unfold it and pretty quickly determine what part was bad with a multimeter and some high school electronics education.

It’s still the standard for “white goods” (larger home appliances) in general.

Many of the simpler devices still do, at least mine do, though my washing machine just buzzes at the end of the cycle and doesn't play music or send me a text.

In the early 80s, computers also came with technical informations. Even consumers oriented things like digital typewriters had programming and electronics booklets in the box. That didn't last :)

> This changed around the 80s from memory?

More like early 90's. In the late 80's it was still common & easy to order schematics, data sheets/books & the like from manufacturers. Usually @ cost, sometimes as a free service.

> The reasoning is pure Tsujimoto. “If you disclose all the information, customers can fix mistakes themselves.”

This was actually the unofficial support policy for Cromemco Inc, "you've got the schematic, what's the problem?".

I've been thinking a good way to understand the 'sociology' of information sharing is the structure of capital or prestige in an ecosystem

For example, it's not an accident that software development is a very 'open' industry. You can learn anything about making a NextJS shopping cart online. Because nobody is really getting value by holding this knowledge as secret 'alpha'

On the flipside for example, academics, scientists and journalists often have very different incentives. Getting the credit for being the first to talk about an issue is what matters for their career so they are likely to be guarded about what they're working on or what their methods are

And this is why Zuck open sources LLMs; he is not really selling tokens in some infra service so keeping the output generation scarce doesn't really matter to Meta

(Joel Spolsky had an adjacent idea saying "Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements" like Billboard publishes a lot of music journalism for free but monetizes their chats/data)

Anyway, so this explains what's going on with this electronics retailer--while it is still a perspective and effort that is uncommon--publishing the schematic is not competitive with the shop unless you start manufacturing and open up another shop

Apropos open electronics, one of my most treasured toys is a Denshi Blocks electronics experiments kit, with a synthesizer chip in it.

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

There are professional versions of the Denshi block, used in engineering schools in Japan in the 80's/90's (as I recall), to lay out circuits and serve as a test-bed for student lab work:

https://www.denshiblock.co.jp/whatdbk.html

In my case, it's just a great reminder of the 70's, and how bright and shiny the future used to seem. Its also a pretty fun little woo-hoo-bonky-boing synth toy, now and then ..

I would have to wonder if there aren't pro blocks in that store somewhere, probably in their own neatly labeled section ..

Reminds me of a vaguely similar toy you used to be able to get at Radio Shack: the "electronics project kits". Typically, a given set of circuit components would be laid out on a board (typically thick cardboard) in a frame (wood). Attached to the leads of the components are small metal springs. You used the provided wires to connect components together by bending the springs back, inserting the stripped ends of the wires between the coils of the spring, and letting the spring snap back into place. Instructions provided with the kit showed you how to connect the components to yield all sorts of interesting things, from simple circuits that could make lights blink to working radio receivers, musical instruments, etc. Some of the more sophisticated and expensive ones had ICs, and I think a few of the later ones had microcontrollers.

I got a couple of these as a kid, handed down from my parents. Quite a bit of fun to play around with. I do remember getting a snap-together circuit which was new, but it just didn't have all the cool bits and the fun little springs of the hand-me-downs.

Yes, the metal spring kits were one thing .. I had one of those too (until its full disassembly for spare parts) .. but in that era, to my 8 year old eyes at the time, the spring kits 'looked old' in comparison to the ultra cool battery-powered, portable, sci-fi looking denshi blocks .. whereas some of us old kids have lego-brick trauma, mine was the denshi-block, always one on the floor to step on, bare-foot .. but man did I love carrying that thing around.

But then, I'd had a Dick Smith Electronics[1] "breadboard" period, the year before, where the components were literally drilled into flakey particle-boards over the schematic, and .. that was fun too.

I "upgraded" from the Denshi blocks and the breadboards, to a soldering iron station and the Fun-Way PCB's .. burned my fingers on the synthesizer kit .. and the rest is history.

[1]-https://ia600409.us.archive.org/7/items/dicksmithsfunwayinto...

In the mid to late 90s I was selling a rocketry flight computer kit:

http://www.taniwha.com/~paul/fc/index.html

We didn't have words to describe "Opensource" yet, I wrote (from the above page):

  This page is designed to be a home for the Taniwha Flight Computer which 
  I'm building and kitting for a number of other interested people. This is 
  NOT a for-profit enterprise - the idea is to get a critical mass of people 
  up and using the same hardware so that they can write cool and interesting 
  code (or make cool and interesting hardware) and share it with everyone else 
  who's using the design.

  A quick note about copyrights etc - all the stuff here is marked with my 
  copyright - this is something I do with everything I design to retain control 
  of my designs should I decide to sell them for profit in the future. However 
  everything in these pages, the design itself and the software that runs on it 
  (at least the stuff I provide) is hereby provided it for anyone's use - but I 
  retain ownership and copyright (even feel free to build them commercially if 
  you want).

You can see the gem of what later became GPL/etc there, using copyrights to retain control while releasing it to the world. Later I added:

  "Open Source" is now all the rage - we've been running this project that way
  for the past 4 years - so as always "feel free to steal anything on these web
  pages".

The GPL was released February 25th 1989 and the Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. Open source was a concept already.

Yeah but when I started the words weren't in common usage - we understood "freeware", but not really for hardware yet

Published schematics go back to the earliest days of radio. Electronics magazines and the Radio Amateur's Handbook are roughly a century old.

Before that, there was science. Although the rules were loosely defined, scientists were expected to provide enough detail in their papers for someone else to replicate their work. That's where I learned about open design, before I learned to program.

Into the modern age, when "code" became part of electronics projects, the magazines printed source code listings, and later required authors to provide their code for an online repository. I published a couple of those articles back in the day.

20 years ago my town had a boutique electronics store, somewhat like a Radio Shack, except they'd developed corporate sales as a revenue stream instead of pushing cellphone contracts on consumers. It carried on until the owner died last year.

I enjoy seeing boutique businesses but it's nice to see one where the core operation (not just the IP) has a shot at outlasting the founder.

"Open Source" is still not a word. It is a phrase, a term, maybe even a thing - but not a word!

I kinda miss the various electronics hobbyist magazines that used to exist too. They didn't always show you everything, and I think some things had to be acquired via snail mail or bbs.. especially code was usually left out of the magazines I read.. but the schematics and articles were usually interesting.

I saw the tail-end of being able to get schematics for consumer devices. I miss that too. Even commercial devices used to be way more open than they are now. Nowadays even farmers have to fight drm to repair their tractors.

Anyone else remember Dick Smiths' Fun Way series?

https://ia600409.us.archive.org/7/items/dicksmithsfunwayinto...

To me, this was my first really practical example of 'open schematics' - it was like opening a book of deep, dark spells .. which anyone could do.

This site, https://fabscene.com/ fascinates me even more

> 100% profit margin [..]

That’s not how these things work

that means $5 part is sold for $10. It's exactly how that kind of thing works

That's actually a 50% profit margin. Also known as a 50% markup, even though you marked the price up by 100%.

It's a 50% profit margin because the profit ($5) is 50% of the selling price.

It's a 100% markup because the selling price is 100% more than the cost.

Some people might call it a 50% markup, but that's purely a deceptive tactic, or just ignorance.

It's the industry-standard (for grocery stores at least) term; doesn't mean it isn't wrong, but it's the way they use it.

Could be deceptive, could be ignorance, but it's multiple unrelated grocery store owners, talking to me as a seller.

No. I got from the article that he's saying that the purchase is sunk cost, so any sale is 100% profit. So it's correct

but there was not a single schematic in article, just pcb view without even traces

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