[HN Gopher] The Hobby Computer Culture
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The Hobby Computer Culture
Author : cfmcdonald
Score : 85 points
Date : 2025-05-24 14:33 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (technicshistory.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (technicshistory.com)
| tocs3 wrote:
| _The first buyers of Altair could not find it in any shop. Every
| transaction occurred via a check sent to MITS, sight unseen, in
| the hopes of receiving a computer in exchange._
|
| 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.
| WillAdams wrote:
| The difference here is that orders placed by USPS mail were
| subject to mail fraud regulations _and enforcement_ --- that
| was _not_ in place for early internet ordering.
|
| 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.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| My father's stereo system was installed in our living room, a
| Heathkit with discrete components, probably a tube-transistor
| hybrid type. I did not witness him in the process of
| assembling it.
|
| 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.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I had one of those, though I knew what I was getting (from
| Edmund Scientific Catalog).
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| That quote bugs me a little because it presumes that mail order
| hadn't existed before then, that it was some sort of "act of
| faith." Sears was selling _whole ass houses_ via the mail in
| the early 1900 's, that's where the term "Craftsman home" came
| from; it's literally the then-owned-by-Sears brand.
| Teever wrote:
| Yeah but Sears is a reputable company selling reputable
| brands that became so ubiquitous as to enter into the
| lexicon.
|
| 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."
| bityard wrote:
| Yes, but there was still fraud. You didn't send your money
| away to just any random ad you ran across. Sears was VERY
| well known. And if you didn't know the company or its
| reputation, you likely wouldn't send your money away to buy
| something without at _least_ hearing a positive experience
| from someone you know and trust.
|
| 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.
| quesera wrote:
| > _that 's where the term "Craftsman home" came from_
|
| 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.
| kens wrote:
| I remember the big 1977-1979 scam with DataSync, World Power
| Systems, and "Colonel David Winthrop" advertising S-100 boards
| and other computer stuff but not shipping it to purchasers
| while also ripping off his suppliers. The article mentions
| Colonel Whitney (not Winthrop) for some reason
|
| Interesting article on it:
| https://medium.com/@madmedic11671/forgotten-fraud-world-powe...
| cfmcdonald wrote:
| Author here. Thank you for the reference, this is very
| helpful. The name "Colonel Whitney" came from a 1984 Stan
| Veit article: https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/computer_mag
| azine_madness...
|
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| I've always been really loved the _bicycles for the mind_
| metaphor and for a while I was cataloging different ways the
| metaphor works for me. Not sure what I did with that list, but
| compiling it was fun and made me think about how I chose to use
| technology.
|
| It feels like the era of the personal computer ended around the
| turn of the century though.
| WillAdams wrote:
| As a person who has finally arrived at a programming setup
| which allows him to finally do what he has dreamed about since
| first trying to sketch things up on a Koala Pad attached to a
| Commodore 64, I would like to gainsay that the personal
| computer revolution has come to an end.
|
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| That looks really cool and I like that it isn't a website.
| There's a Whitfield Diffie quote I've mentioned a few times
| on HN. It's from Ellen Ullman's book _Life in Code_ [1]:
|
| > 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-...
| WillAdams wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Just to pick a turning point of sorts, it ended when you needed
| to password protect your "account". In short, the internet
| killed the "personal" computer.
| msgodel wrote:
| I think LLMs will bring it back. This is one part of the future
| I'm hopeful about.
|
| On the other hand I was thinking something similar with
| smartphones and look how that ended up.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > Even as late as 1978, an informed observer could still consider
| interest in personal computers to be exclusive to a self-limiting
| community of hobbyists
|
| WHAT? That was true even well into the 1980s.
| WillAdams wrote:
| The Personal Computer became an accepted, even required
| business device when IBM launched their PC in 1981 --- at that
| point, w/ WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 there was a standard set
| to which folks for the most part adhered --- going into a
| Compubiz? (blanking on the name) which sold Big-Blue to
| businesses was a lot different than going to an Apple reseller
| at that time, or earlier.
|
| 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....
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Probably worked out pretty well. I get the impression that
| people tried harder back then: stuff cost more and there was
| less help available. So, if you even attempted to jump in the
| deep end, you were committed.
|
| 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.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > 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 :-)
|
| That was really touching. Thank you for sharing.
|
| "Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us
| to the thing."
| BirAdam wrote:
| After VisiCalc, there were plenty of computer users who were
| not hobbyists.
| robterrell wrote:
| Here's a fun fact: in the photo of the Byte Shop, the person in
| the window with their back to the camera is John Draper, the
| legendary hacker known as Captain Crunch.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| I've been fascinated with the phreaks ever since I downloaded
| my first copy of the anarchists guide off my local BBS.
| nxobject wrote:
| You might like Evan Doorbell's YT channel then - he has a lot
| of old tapes from his misspent youth traveling the world on
| Ma Bell's dime, and has posted a lot of videos explaining it
| all for a generation (like mine) without any frame of
| reference.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@evandoorbell4278
| plapsley wrote:
| Evan's stuff is excellent and worth watching/listening to.
|
| 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. :-)
| panzagl wrote:
| I enjoyed your book, made sense of a lot of things 13
| year old me had stumbled upon that I could never get to
| work (as I was maybe 5 years too late).
| plapsley wrote:
| That's awesome, thank you!
| throwaway9191aa wrote:
| I very much recommend this book as well. Great read.
| Thanks for writing it!
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Wild. How do we know that? (Is that his VW outside?)
| robterrell wrote:
| My uncle is Paul Terrell, the owner of that Byte Shop. He
| showed me the photo and told me who was in the window. But I
| don't have an independent verification of this -- dunno,
| maybe Captain Crunch is a lurker here?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Very cool.
| fernly wrote:
| The address given for the Byte Shop, "1063 El Camino Real in
| Mountain View", is ambiguous. It needs to specify either 1063
| EAST El Camino Real or 1063 WEST El Camino Real, two quite
| different locations.
|
| 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.
| always-open wrote:
| It's West. If you look at google maps for that location, there
| is a landmark pinned for "The Original Byte Shop". There you
| can see a B&W photo from back in the day.
| fitsumbelay wrote:
| I used to get a free subscription to BYTE in the early 80s,
| probably through Scholastic. Had no understanding of the code or
| the images I was looking at but never stopped looking or trying
| to get it. Byte in particular was pretty thick for a magazine. I
| believe it had a spine like a book if I'm not mistaken ...
| greenbit wrote:
| I recall those being easily half an inch thick on a regular
| basis, with a definite squared-up binding.
| mrandish wrote:
| While the "hobby computer club culture" is known for introducing
| Steve Jobs to Woz, I suspect it enabled many thousands of similar
| life and industry changing personal collisions. It certainly did
| for me. In 1982 my teenage self started a local computer club for
| my 4K 8-bit Radio Shack Color Computer which I promoted by
| printing up flyers and driving around to a dozen Radio Shack
| stores and convincing the managers to post them near the
| computer. The first meeting was at my house with a dozen or so
| people but quickly outgrew that and moved to a local community
| center. I mostly started it because there was a lack of
| information that was specific to the computer I owned except for
| two hobby-level monthly 'zines (only available by subscription)
| and I didn't have any computer knowledge myself (or know _anyone_
| with a computer).
|
| 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.
| bityard wrote:
| This happened a couple decades later, but my first FOUR tech
| jobs came from attending a local Linux user group and
| networking with the people there.
|
| 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.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| I wonder whether the hobbyist/hacker mindset versus the big metal
| mindset has anything to do with Cutler's distaste for Unix.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| It was definitely an interesting time. That said, the summer of
| '78 I was renting a room from an IBM engineer who had bought a
| Heathkit H-11 and was using it to trade stocks. They would enter
| the prices from the Wall Street Journal every day of the stocks
| they were interested it, and then run their "algorithm" over them
| and it would spit out "weights" for buying or selling various
| stocks. They could then call their broker and have them execute a
| trade.
|
| 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.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _what would he do with his time if he wasn 't working?_
|
| 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.
| glimshe wrote:
| I agree with you in principle. At the same time, analysis
| paralysis and lack of focus can be problems. When you can do
| 1000 things, what will you pick? Also, are you going to
| persevere through bumps if you could switch to other 999
| things?
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Than working at IBM in peak-mainframe era? I could not
| imagine a more exciting place to be at that time!
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| _I will never understand people who can 't think of anything
| to do if they didn't have a job._
|
| 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.
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| According to [0], 4 million in August 1978 is 19.5 million
| today.
|
| [0] https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Sounds about right. I certainly thought it was "infinite"
| money at the time.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| I'd argue that this hobby computer culture is still alive in
| well, but in a different form: the large number of vintage
| computing hobbyist groups that work to restore, understand, and
| make new hardware for the simplistic systems that formed the
| early days of computing. They enjoy the same optimism that drove
| the early hobby culture, but from a different vantage point - one
| of research and understanding - but the enjoyment and excitement
| are still there.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| > ...personal computers have already proliferated beyond most
| government regulation. People already have them, just like
| (pardon the analogy) people already have hand guns. If you have a
| computer, use it. It is your equalizer. It is a way to organize
| and fight back against the impersonal institutions and the
| catch-22 regulations of modern society.[28]
|
| And now look where we are at, we allowed impersonal institutions
| to use them against us.
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