[HN Gopher] The Hobby Computer Culture
___________________________________________________________________
The Hobby Computer Culture
Author : cfmcdonald
Score : 176 points
Date : 2025-05-24 14:33 UTC (4 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).
| ghaff wrote:
| I loved that catalog as a kid. American Science and
| Surplus is probably its spiritual descendent if not quite
| the same thing.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Edmund at least held on to the non-professional side of
| its optics business through Anchor Optical Supply. But
| yeah, I miss paging through the original catalogs. I
| think I still have the "How to make a Telescope" book
| although I lost the mirror blank several moves ago.
| 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.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Once upon a time I actually bought (and sold!) stuff on ebay
| (or rather, auctionweb, at ebay.com/aw, the auctions were only
| a part of the site!) with postal money orders. After all, a
| fraudster would be caught out by bad feedback! The internet
| felt a lot cozier then.
| segmondy wrote:
| In the mid 90's I sent about $200 in money order to Nigeria to
| buy a bunch of cassette tapes from some random internet person
| and what would you know? 2 months later, I had 50 tapes at my
| doorstep.
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| Because lots of things go in cycles and the other end of
| the cycle has many problems as well.
| 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.
| Mr_Minderbinder wrote:
| Before those came along I was perfectly content using a
| computer with 4 or 8 GB of RAM or less and thought that ought
| to be more enough for anything I wanted to do with computers
| for the rest of my life. Now I find myself wondering how much
| more RAM and what new GPU I am going to need to run a model
| with tens or hundreds of billions of parameters. A few years
| ago I might have agreed with those who say the personal
| computer revolution has long been over. Indeed there was a
| long period with few new milestones or innovation. But now I
| see that that sentiment was mostly a failure of my (and
| their) imagination.
| 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.
| acheron wrote:
| I don't think so. My dad worked for a consulting firm ("Big
| Eight" as they called it back then) in the early-mid 80s and as
| far as I can tell his job mainly involved slinging Lotus 1-2-3
| spreadsheets on PCs. PCs very quickly infiltrated business
| starting in the 80s and had already left the exclusive
| "community of 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!
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Exploding The Phone was an excellent read.
| 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.
| vram22 wrote:
| Almost like the Putnam question on HN:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&q
| u...
| 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.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Many of the early computer magazines were quite thick --- the
| TRS-80 magazine was quite dense, and I spent a lot of time
| entering computer programs from them.
|
| Byte gradually lost page count over the years... May 1991 was
| 388 pages, while Oct. 1995 was 250.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| _Computer Shopper_ was basically 900 pages of adverts with some
| editorial and reviews here and there to make people want to
| subscribe.
|
| _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.
| 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.
| jjav wrote:
| I am also a Radio Shack Color Computer alumni, owe my career to
| it. I started using OS-9 as soon as I could afford to upgrade
| to 64K RAM, to which I thank feeling right at home with SunOS
| after I got access to that in the university.
|
| 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!
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think it's different. Cutler's alleged distaste for Unix
| (don't have first-hand knowledge) was that he viewed it as
| basically a product of ivory tower academics as I understand
| it.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Thanks, I got the impression from this podcast, but I could
| be wrong as I listened it while driving :D
|
| https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-
| showsto...
| ghaff wrote:
| There are various versions of the relationship between
| Cutler and Unix. Showstopper has one. Bryan et al may have
| another. And there are doubtless multiple others.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Kinda wish I could ask him in person...
| hollerith wrote:
| Early Unix is not the product of hobbyist culture, but rather
| of an elite institution (Bell Labs) that only hired from the
| top science and engineering schools. The other institution
| involved in the early development of Unix was the CS Department
| of UC Berkeley, whose work was funded by DARPA, which is
| approximately the complete opposite of hobbyist culture.
|
| 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.
| 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!
| kragen wrote:
| You could not imagine a more exciting place to be in 01978?
| How about Xerox PARC, Microsoft, Apple, the MIT AI Lab,
| Symbolics, LMI, SRI-NIC, Tymshare, Intel, Mostek, Zilog,
| Control Data Corporation, Cray, Commodore, HP, Texas
| Instruments, Tandem, DEC, Data General, Linear Technology,
| Signetics, or CompuServe? You could spend your time
| inventing things that changed the world for the better,
| instead of in pointless political maneuvering within IBM to
| ship products everybody hated.
|
| What are the nearest equivalents today?
| 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.
| saulpw wrote:
| > 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?
|
| 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.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Could you say more about that? I don't think of it as
| patronage and I agree with this statement: _"
| Corporations only pay you money to exert your brain
| towards some goal."_ but in my experience you can go to a
| corporation and say "I'm really interested in working on
| <this thing>, are you interested in that sort of stuff?"
| And if they are they'll start paying you money to explore
| that thing with them. I did exactly this the first time I
| "retired", I'm really fascinated by software defined
| radio and I was exploring how it works and what one could
| do with it and a friend said, "I'm working at a company
| that needs help understanding how to do repeatable
| software and they are doing a lot of SDR work." Which led
| to a conversation with the CEO that led to a job offer
| where I helped their software teams get better and I got
| to use the multi-million dollar RF lab to continue my
| explorations. Granted my role was "technical leader" and
| not "programmer" but how I spent my time was a joint
| agreement between the company leadership and my
| interests. I wouldn't expect a company doing accounting
| software to pay me to design SDRs of course.
|
| 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 :-).
| keiferski wrote:
| Getting paid to work on your hobby only works if your
| hobby is somehow tangential to industry. For technical
| people, this isn't really a big issue, because we live in
| a society that puts technical achievements (which result
| in profits) above pretty much everything else.
|
| 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.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| "Hey, HP? I'm really interested in working on a new way
| to tie flies for fly fishing, are you interested in that
| sort of stuff?"
|
| I wonder why I haven't heard back....
| smokel wrote:
| There are still people with too much money who want to do
| good. In the art world, for example, it is pretty common
| to sponsor promising artists in one way or the other.
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think the problem with doing this at companies is that
| there tends to be a lot of BS associated with actually
| working at a company (good things as well but not sure as
| much in a largely remote situation).
|
| 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.
| paulcole wrote:
| > 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?
|
| 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.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I don't know anyone who "defaulted" to working when they
| didn't have to. I do know several people who actively
| avoid explaining why they are working to people who don't
| have the choice to work or not.
| paulcole wrote:
| Huh? Isn't that what the IBM guy in your original story
| was doing?
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that guy didn't go around telling people
| "I'm rich but I only do this job because I like it."
| paulcole wrote:
| I don't understand this comment. He literally did tell a
| person this.
|
| > 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?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Misunderstanding, I asked him that exact question which
| was "Why are you working when you could be doing anything
| you want?" and his response was that he was doing what he
| wanted. It was a conscious choice. I've mentioned this
| before but I joined Sun Microsystems the Monday _after_
| they had gone public on Friday. As a result I had a
| unique opportunity to become acquainted with a large
| number of people > 1000 who had become suddenly wealthy.
| The observation was that some of them wanted "big things"
| and some of them wanted "small things." It seems to be an
| individual preference thing. But mostly people didn't
| become 'asshole rich people'[1], the majority went off to
| do the thing they enjoyed doing. One of my co-workers
| left Sun, paid off their house, and spent their time
| doing hobby robotics stuff. If you're a curious person
| with average or better intelligence, working is much more
| preferable to being bored. That was Guido's complaint, he
| could do what ever he wanted but he was bored, and one
| thing "work" does is supply a bunch of things to do.
|
| [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.
| paulcole wrote:
| > If you're a curious person with average or better
| intelligence, working is much more preferable to being
| bored.
|
| If you're a curious person with average or better
| intelligence you'll never be bored.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| My mom told me that once I learned to read I would never
| be bored. Turns out that wasn't accurate :-)
| rendx wrote:
| > and one thing "work" does is supply a bunch of things
| to do.
|
| and a social environment. "belonging" is a very important
| human need.
| protocolture wrote:
| Lmao, if I had 4 million bucks I would probably be
| maintaining some old 70s era mainframe trying to get it to do
| dumb shit like messing with stocks.
|
| This guy got to do it AND got paid.
| emmelaich wrote:
| For many people, mucking around with computers is a hobby
| that happens to pay pretty well.
| Someone wrote:
| > Money is usually a limiting factor, but it sounds like it
| might not have been for this person.
|
| 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.
| Gollapalli wrote:
| He was a guy interested in computers working at IBM at a time
| when computers were just getting going.
|
| 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.
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| There's enjoyment and excitement, but rather than the optimism
| of an unbounded future of unimaginable wonders, in my
| experience they're animated by a profound pessimism about the
| current state of computing and where it's going.
| 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.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| People still build their own computers. Just the other day I saw
| a (relatively recent) design for an Intel 486 motherboard. The
| only difference is they don't really _do_ anything with these
| hobby computers.
| kragen wrote:
| The article says, "Discussion of practical software
| applications appeared infrequently. One intrepid soul went so
| far as to hypothesize a microcomputer-based accounting program,
| but he doesn't seem to have actually written it." So I think
| building hobby computers you don't really do anything with was
| already a popular activity at the time.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Alongside the "excessive discussion of "super space electronic
| hangman life-war pong" were hardware hackers hooking up an S100
| bus to AppleIIs or running CP/M on some weird machine via a z80
| add-on card.
|
| 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.
| jwr wrote:
| I have been thinking about this recently. The people building
| those hobby computers at the time were spending huge amounts of
| money on building devices that were arguably not useful at all
| for anything practical. It was pure exploration of new ideas.
|
| 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.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| You touch on two interesting, intertwined topics that don't
| seem connected at first, but they just connected for me.
|
| 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.
| jwr wrote:
| I've been thinking along similar lines when I tried to figure
| out if the obsession with getting something cheaper is a
| cultural thing, or an actual necessity. I think it's a
| mixture of both, and I agree that economic anxiety does play
| a part.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| I've been thinking about this too. I'll sometimes run across
| some part of the Chinese internet where people are creating
| some niche product to sell on aliexpress. It's less about IP
| and more about the product. They're inherently short lived
| and typically evolve past the original idea.
|
| 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.
| mickey475778 wrote:
| As someone who got their start with an Apple II, this perfectly
| captures the spirit of the hobbyist era. It wasn't just about
| using computers; it was about understanding them from the ground
| up. That foundational curiosity, I think, is something we
| sometimes lose in our modern, abstracted systems.
| Lerc wrote:
| In the 80's our school got a room full of apple IIs. It
| resulted in me getting a school report that said that I needed
| to learn to use computers for something other than programming.
|
| It struck me as a little odd because you can't program a
| computer without having a task that you want to do. That was
| the boring bit though, getting the computer to do it was where
| the fun was.
|
| In hindsight I never learned very much from the school
| computers. The limited access meant you couldn't dedicate the
| time needed for a deep dive. I was lucky to have computers at
| home. over time A trs-80, PET, vic-20, c64, Amiga. No Apple at
| home though. The real learning came from spending hours at a
| time mucking around with them. Also Compute, and Dr Dobbs were
| invaluable growing up in a town of about 5,000 information was
| limited.
|
| For all that people complain about the internet rotting the
| brains of our youth, I know there are kids out there that are
| like I was, they have easy access to so much more information.
| They will do some great things, and they will do it because
| it's interesting, not because it will make them rich.
| bandoti wrote:
| I picked up a Commodore 64 that came with the
| guidebook/developer manual and it's honestly inspiring.
|
| The fact that it comes with the complete assembly language,
| circuit diagrams, and BASIC language reference is something you
| just don't see today.
|
| Being able to write whatever in whichever places in memory
| makes it more of a tool fostering creative expression.
|
| Honestly, before reading through those manuals I never really
| needed to consider having to implement multiplication in terms
| of addition instructions.
|
| Even though those are basic properties of arithmetic, it's easy
| to take for granted.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| LOL. You're bringing back memories of having to implement
| long division by extended subtractions.
|
| It was having to do that (embedded processor) that made me
| vow to never again code in Assembly and look for a processor
| that had a cheap C compiler.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| At least over here, the Apple II was in a different segment
| from the hobby computing scene. You'd find that in reputable
| office equipment stores, together with t he likes of the
| Osbourne etc.. It was out of the pricerange of 99% of the
| hobbyists that made do with brands such as Sinclair and
| Comodore at less than a fifth of the price.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| The article is talking about hardware, but it largely applies to
| software just the same.
|
| 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.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Remember, there was no Internet, so all info you got was by word
| of mouth from fellow enthusiasts, or from a few magazines, which
| were only to be found in a special newspaper shop in a nearby
| major city to which you made a pilgrimage by train every month.
|
| 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.
| keernan wrote:
| Back in 1977 I worked as a young lawyer in a firm of 10 which
| used a mimeograph machine in the basement to print (smelly) blue
| printed sheets of paper used for timesheets to record billing
| information. Case information was stored on index cards in
| different metal containers: one kept by file number; another kept
| alphabetically with multiple cards for every party to a case.
|
| 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.
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