5 ms·

I can't help but ask...what's the equivalent net worth at the time of all that stuff? I'm a little bit in awe at the prospect of having so much stuff as a teen

I can't help but ask...what's the equivalent net worth at the time of all that stuff? I'm a little bit in awe at the prospect of having so much stuff as a teenager :) Is it super accepting parents and he just scrounged what he could somehow, parents/family in the biz/already hobbyists, super rich parents/family... Was it all actually exceptionally cheap? Help me understand how this happened...

GuiA 8y ago
Teenagers in the US often work, but typically have no rent to pay or other necessary expenses. Combined to growing up in a non poor family, some scrounging around second hand stores, getting broken stuff from friends/family members that you repair yourself, etc... is how it’d happen.
setquk 8y ago
In the UK I spent nearly nothing at all really. Most of it was scrounged, stolen out of skips and bins or bought for trivial prices at car boot or jumble sales. The latter you could pick up an old late 1960s amp for 5-10p (7-15 cents today) because the fuse had gone. Usually turned out to be something trivial. The big expense was a soldering iron which I paid £5 for, a lot of money, by trading excess book vouchers I got for it (people kept buying me book vouchers endlessly). That landed me a 1965ish weller iron. That allowed me to fix anything.
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  I'm surprised that a soldering iron cost you so much. You could probably get a soldering iron for £5 today. Not a great one by any means, I certainly wouldn't be doing SMD soldering with it, but adequate for through hole and point to point wiring. It probably won't last as long either. My old man has a couple of soldering irons for the 70's that still work great. You'd be paying over $100 for the same iron these days. He also still has the same roll of solder that he had in the 80's. A kilogram of solder lasts a long time. In fact, most of his electrical tools from the 80's are in good condition and get regular use.
  - setquk 8y ago
    It was a really nice Weller one that was temperature controlled so it was worth it at the time. The other option available was a new Antex one for more money which was rubbish. The Weller was still working fine when I sold it in 2001. I’ve got a newer Weller TCP station now that gets used for everything from 0603 SMD devices through massive capacitors. Cost around $300 (more than a Hakko) but was worth it as it’s absolutely bomb proof and a pleasure to use for extended periods. Most of my equipment now is from the 1970s and 1980s. It’s cheap, reliable and easy to repair if it does break.
  - nl 8y ago
    It's weird what things were expensive. I can confirm soldering irons used to be expensive. Generally speaking tools are much, much cheaper in relative terms than they used to be. I remember looking longingly at a mini-wood lathe in a model magazine in the 1980s. It was super cheap, ad something like $300. There's no way it worked as well as something like this random < $50 one now: https://www.banggood.com/DC-24V-Mini-Lathe-Beads-Machine-Polish-Woodworking-DIY-Tools-80-100W-p-1121255.html https://www.banggood.com/DC-24V-Mini-Lathe-Beads-Machine-Pol...
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Save that solder. It's likely lead-based, and will have better flow and make longer-lasting connections.
    - Kliment 8y ago
      Modern lead-free solder is excellent, but most hobbyists who never buy solder only have a roll of historical lead-free solder from when it was crap, have awful experience with it, and pass that experience on. You can still buy leaded solder everywhere today and the flux is not as nasty as the ancient ones. Make sure you don't mix the two as lead-free solder doesn't like to stick to leaded and vice versa. So for repairing old stuff leaded solder is still important, but it's no longer a compromise to use lead-free. Also, wash your hands after soldering!
fit2rule 8y ago
I think back in the 70's there was less resistance to the idea of kids (teenagers) doing chores and having odd jobs as a way of making spendable income .. these days, its kind of resisted as it means you're too poor to be a proper member of middle-class consumption society, or something. Still, I think its a definite ethical difference - back then, kids developed the skills to survive in capitalistic society pretty early - paper routes, odd jobs, etc. These days, it really seems like raising kids to deal with capitalism involves turning them into rabid frothy-mouthed commies who only want to tear down the state and replace it with non-work-required utopia...
- JohnBooty 8y ago
  These days, it really seems like raising kids to deal with capitalism involves turning them into rabid frothy-mouthed commies who only want to tear down the state and replace it with non-work-required utopia What? As a capitalist myself here's a book I really recommend: https://www.amazon.com/Marx-Beginners-Rius/dp/0375714618 https://www.amazon.com/Marx-Beginners-Rius/dp/0375714618 I suspect you will walk away from it thinking the same thing most people do: Marx's criticisms of capitalism are absolutely vital and relevant to this day... and his solutions are even worse, and that capitalism is still probably the least terrible solution we've got. :) But more to the point: there is no definition of socialism or communism that even remotely advocates this a "non-work-required utopia." It's all about work and workers! (Now, in practice, socialist/communist societies wound up stratifying anyway, and elites often didn't exactly have to spend their days in a coal mine or shoveling pig shit like the commonfolk. But that's been pretty much true of every economic system under the sun since the beginning of mankind. So, even a cursory glance at history tells us that this is not a problem unique to socialism or communism.)
  - fit2rule 8y ago
    I'm not looking for a pro-/anti- discussion. Dialectic materialism never solved a thing. What I do want to point out though, is that teens don't work like they used to. Some think thats a good thing; others do not. Alas, only the prosperity of future generations can really provide a valid indicator ..
inteleng 8y ago
I think it's unlikely that 'super rich parents' in the 70s would even tolerate the borderline junk collection of this guy.
matt_j 8y ago
Scrounging is a fine art. I had a room full of electronic gear as a child, a steady stream of computers (286, 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium II, III) and hi-fi components (amp, tuner, tape deck, turntable). My folks were poor, but Dad was a technician and new how to find stuff (garage sale, auction, school/office offloading gear, etc) and give it a quick fix up and a polish.
kokey 8y ago
I suspect it also depends on where you lived. I lived in a small town in South Africa, and I am in awe at the quality of the junk this guy picked up and when I moved to the UK seeing the stuff that people threw away was like witnessing the most amazing treasure. I'm sure there's even such variation depending on where you live inside the US.
VLM 8y ago
Computer people take it for granted that prices collapse. Of course the GTX1050Ti that I bought a couple years ago is now a third of its selling cost. I paid a lot of money for a Matrox G200 graphics card almost exactly 20 years ago... what would you pay today (in a strictly utilitarian non-collector sense) ? If my son asked for it, I would hand it to him, not implying he's rich, but that graphics card was made long before he was born, so its not terribly valuable beyond collectors. The era of the linked article was an era of transistorization. His vacuum tube amp reminded me of the research lab grade Tektronix 545-series o-scope I owned with 500 watts of vacuum tubes and those weird ceramic and gold plate standoffs instead of PCBs, my Heathkit SB-102 vacuum tube ham SSB radio, and my motorola land mobile receiver and transmitter strips converted for the then new 2 meter ham radio repeater fad (which has since mostly disappeared). That o-scope in the mid 50s cost someone about one new house, by the mid 80s I got it for $100 with all the plugins, while living in a $100K house, figure it dropped in value by a thousand over a quarter century. My dad paid about a mortgage payment for the SB-102 when it was new, maybe 15 years later I got it for free when he upgraded, just too many microprocessor controlled features with no change in performance specs.. Note that with computers you can't do anything in 2018 with 1998 equipment, it won't work or the software and protocols are not designed to be compatible on purpose. However literal research lab grade work in the mid 50s is roughly equivalent to average dude work in the 80s so in the late 80s paying $100 for a file cabinet sized o-scope was reasonable because it was totally useful and practical and I learned a lot using it, if not terribly portable or reliable (burning out tubes, need to realign after replacement, etc) There was also an interesting aspect to 70s stagflation, everything before 1980 cost ten times as much, so that also excited the depreciation. In the 50s $10K would buy a nice house, but once people got used to paying $100K (and now $1M) a dollar isn't worth what it used to be. Also the nostalgia of time smooths things over, but a 1950 car was kinda rusted out and worn out by 1959 so people get weird feels about a kid driving a 1950-whatever automobile when that thing was pretty worthless at the time the kid had it in 1959, and this extends to electronics. I'm sure someone saved a lot of money for a long time to buy the very late 60s Sony black and white 7 inch TV I had in the early 80s as a home computer monitor, and to have that as a kid as my computer monitor during the moon landings would imply I was quite rich; but in 1982 or so that TV being used as a monitor would imply a bit of poverty, maybe, and in a nostalgic sense it gets blurred into "70s" and I must have been a rich kid, LOL. This is already the case with computers. Nobody does anything new or exciting or more productive in nearly a decade. There are tail-fin like style changes. Someday a teen in 2030 will get a 2020 laptop that cost a huge pile of money in 2020, totally handles the workload in 2030, and some dude in 2070 will accuse the teen of having been rich because that laptop cost a boatload of money in 2020. Of course in 2030 with a scratched up screen and dead battery and deeply un-stylish exterior the kid only had to pay $50 inflation adjusted equivalent, so the kid was not necessarily rich.
Yetanfou 8y ago
You'd be amazed at how much an enterprising person can collect for nothing but some blood, sweat and ingenuity. I ended up with a room looking somewhat like that by finding and repairing stuff here and there, often dumped at the street for the garbage truck to collect. Amplifiers with blown channels? dump ' m. Television with a fried tripler (HT ladder) or HT diode? On the street! Speaker boxes with one blown driver? Get rid of it. Reel to reel deck with some bad rubber here and there? Tube radio which just sits and hums? Begone, who wants a boat anchor like that? Well, I did. It launched me on a career of 'rescuing' left-over hardware which still keeps me from buying new stuff unless absolutely necessary. While I might not be a good consumer (my father's oft-heard reaction when I spoke of my latest conquest: 'if everyone were like you the economy would crumble, just toss the rubbish and buy something new') but I don't feel this to be a prime responsibility: we're not here to support the economy, the economy exists by virtue of all our interactions. If the economy can only survive by virtue of people being wasteful the solution is not to produce more waste but to fix the economy. This will lead to some articles becoming more expensive - like they used to be - but it will also lead to less waste being produced, fixing another problem. The rapid pace of technical developments between the 50's - the era from which some of the stuff our teenage bedrooms were filled with - and now has been part of the reason for the development of modern throw-away equipment. Now that this pace has slowed down and in some cases halted or reversed (want a good compact cassette player? Buy a second-hand older model and restore it) there is often no direct incitement for replacement of 'obsolete' hardware: an amplifier from the 90's sounds just as good as one from two decades later. It would make sense to repair that older model instead of buying something new, were it not for the fact that somewhere along the line manufacturers 'forgot' to think about repairability when designing hardware, 'forgot' about providing schematic diagrams or only provided them to 'authorised' repair centres, started using hard to source components, etc. Fortunately those latter 'omissions' have been reversed for a good deal by the existence of active repair communities on the 'net ([1], [2], etc) so the curious and enterprising can still continue on their mission of learning and discovery. [1] https://www.eserviceinfo.com/ https://www.eserviceinfo.com/ [2] https://elektrotanya.com https://elektrotanya.com

GuiA 8y ago

Teenagers in the US often work, but typically have no rent to pay or other necessary expenses. Combined to growing up in a non poor family, some scrounging around second hand stores, getting broken stuff from friends/family members that you repair yourself, etc... is how it’d happen.

setquk 8y ago

In the UK I spent nearly nothing at all really. Most of it was scrounged, stolen out of skips and bins or bought for trivial prices at car boot or jumble sales. The latter you could pick up an old late 1960s amp for 5-10p (7-15 cents today) because the fuse had gone. Usually turned out to be something trivial. The big expense was a soldering iron which I paid £5 for, a lot of money, by trading excess book vouchers I got for it (people kept buying me book vouchers endlessly). That landed me a 1965ish weller iron. That allowed me to fix anything.

toomanybeersies 8y ago
I'm surprised that a soldering iron cost you so much. You could probably get a soldering iron for £5 today. Not a great one by any means, I certainly wouldn't be doing SMD soldering with it, but adequate for through hole and point to point wiring. It probably won't last as long either. My old man has a couple of soldering irons for the 70's that still work great. You'd be paying over $100 for the same iron these days. He also still has the same roll of solder that he had in the 80's. A kilogram of solder lasts a long time. In fact, most of his electrical tools from the 80's are in good condition and get regular use.
- setquk 8y ago
  It was a really nice Weller one that was temperature controlled so it was worth it at the time. The other option available was a new Antex one for more money which was rubbish. The Weller was still working fine when I sold it in 2001. I’ve got a newer Weller TCP station now that gets used for everything from 0603 SMD devices through massive capacitors. Cost around $300 (more than a Hakko) but was worth it as it’s absolutely bomb proof and a pleasure to use for extended periods. Most of my equipment now is from the 1970s and 1980s. It’s cheap, reliable and easy to repair if it does break.
- nl 8y ago
  It's weird what things were expensive. I can confirm soldering irons used to be expensive. Generally speaking tools are much, much cheaper in relative terms than they used to be. I remember looking longingly at a mini-wood lathe in a model magazine in the 1980s. It was super cheap, ad something like $300. There's no way it worked as well as something like this random < $50 one now: https://www.banggood.com/DC-24V-Mini-Lathe-Beads-Machine-Polish-Woodworking-DIY-Tools-80-100W-p-1121255.html https://www.banggood.com/DC-24V-Mini-Lathe-Beads-Machine-Pol...
- ams6110 8y ago
  Save that solder. It's likely lead-based, and will have better flow and make longer-lasting connections.
  - Kliment 8y ago
    Modern lead-free solder is excellent, but most hobbyists who never buy solder only have a roll of historical lead-free solder from when it was crap, have awful experience with it, and pass that experience on. You can still buy leaded solder everywhere today and the flux is not as nasty as the ancient ones. Make sure you don't mix the two as lead-free solder doesn't like to stick to leaded and vice versa. So for repairing old stuff leaded solder is still important, but it's no longer a compromise to use lead-free. Also, wash your hands after soldering!

fit2rule 8y ago

I think back in the 70's there was less resistance to the idea of kids (teenagers) doing chores and having odd jobs as a way of making spendable income .. these days, its kind of resisted as it means you're too poor to be a proper member of middle-class consumption society, or something. Still, I think its a definite ethical difference - back then, kids developed the skills to survive in capitalistic society pretty early - paper routes, odd jobs, etc. These days, it really seems like raising kids to deal with capitalism involves turning them into rabid frothy-mouthed commies who only want to tear down the state and replace it with non-work-required utopia...

JohnBooty 8y ago
These days, it really seems like raising kids to deal with capitalism involves turning them into rabid frothy-mouthed commies who only want to tear down the state and replace it with non-work-required utopia What? As a capitalist myself here's a book I really recommend: https://www.amazon.com/Marx-Beginners-Rius/dp/0375714618 https://www.amazon.com/Marx-Beginners-Rius/dp/0375714618 I suspect you will walk away from it thinking the same thing most people do: Marx's criticisms of capitalism are absolutely vital and relevant to this day... and his solutions are even worse, and that capitalism is still probably the least terrible solution we've got. :) But more to the point: there is no definition of socialism or communism that even remotely advocates this a "non-work-required utopia." It's all about work and workers! (Now, in practice, socialist/communist societies wound up stratifying anyway, and elites often didn't exactly have to spend their days in a coal mine or shoveling pig shit like the commonfolk. But that's been pretty much true of every economic system under the sun since the beginning of mankind. So, even a cursory glance at history tells us that this is not a problem unique to socialism or communism.)
- fit2rule 8y ago
  I'm not looking for a pro-/anti- discussion. Dialectic materialism never solved a thing. What I do want to point out though, is that teens don't work like they used to. Some think thats a good thing; others do not. Alas, only the prosperity of future generations can really provide a valid indicator ..

inteleng 8y ago

I think it's unlikely that 'super rich parents' in the 70s would even tolerate the borderline junk collection of this guy.

matt_j 8y ago

Scrounging is a fine art. I had a room full of electronic gear as a child, a steady stream of computers (286, 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium II, III) and hi-fi components (amp, tuner, tape deck, turntable). My folks were poor, but Dad was a technician and new how to find stuff (garage sale, auction, school/office offloading gear, etc) and give it a quick fix up and a polish.

kokey 8y ago

I suspect it also depends on where you lived. I lived in a small town in South Africa, and I am in awe at the quality of the junk this guy picked up and when I moved to the UK seeing the stuff that people threw away was like witnessing the most amazing treasure. I'm sure there's even such variation depending on where you live inside the US.

VLM 8y ago

Computer people take it for granted that prices collapse. Of course the GTX1050Ti that I bought a couple years ago is now a third of its selling cost. I paid a lot of money for a Matrox G200 graphics card almost exactly 20 years ago... what would you pay today (in a strictly utilitarian non-collector sense) ? If my son asked for it, I would hand it to him, not implying he's rich, but that graphics card was made long before he was born, so its not terribly valuable beyond collectors. The era of the linked article was an era of transistorization. His vacuum tube amp reminded me of the research lab grade Tektronix 545-series o-scope I owned with 500 watts of vacuum tubes and those weird ceramic and gold plate standoffs instead of PCBs, my Heathkit SB-102 vacuum tube ham SSB radio, and my motorola land mobile receiver and transmitter strips converted for the then new 2 meter ham radio repeater fad (which has since mostly disappeared). That o-scope in the mid 50s cost someone about one new house, by the mid 80s I got it for $100 with all the plugins, while living in a $100K house, figure it dropped in value by a thousand over a quarter century. My dad paid about a mortgage payment for the SB-102 when it was new, maybe 15 years later I got it for free when he upgraded, just too many microprocessor controlled features with no change in performance specs.. Note that with computers you can't do anything in 2018 with 1998 equipment, it won't work or the software and protocols are not designed to be compatible on purpose. However literal research lab grade work in the mid 50s is roughly equivalent to average dude work in the 80s so in the late 80s paying $100 for a file cabinet sized o-scope was reasonable because it was totally useful and practical and I learned a lot using it, if not terribly portable or reliable (burning out tubes, need to realign after replacement, etc) There was also an interesting aspect to 70s stagflation, everything before 1980 cost ten times as much, so that also excited the depreciation. In the 50s $10K would buy a nice house, but once people got used to paying $100K (and now $1M) a dollar isn't worth what it used to be. Also the nostalgia of time smooths things over, but a 1950 car was kinda rusted out and worn out by 1959 so people get weird feels about a kid driving a 1950-whatever automobile when that thing was pretty worthless at the time the kid had it in 1959, and this extends to electronics. I'm sure someone saved a lot of money for a long time to buy the very late 60s Sony black and white 7 inch TV I had in the early 80s as a home computer monitor, and to have that as a kid as my computer monitor during the moon landings would imply I was quite rich; but in 1982 or so that TV being used as a monitor would imply a bit of poverty, maybe, and in a nostalgic sense it gets blurred into "70s" and I must have been a rich kid, LOL. This is already the case with computers. Nobody does anything new or exciting or more productive in nearly a decade. There are tail-fin like style changes. Someday a teen in 2030 will get a 2020 laptop that cost a huge pile of money in 2020, totally handles the workload in 2030, and some dude in 2070 will accuse the teen of having been rich because that laptop cost a boatload of money in 2020. Of course in 2030 with a scratched up screen and dead battery and deeply un-stylish exterior the kid only had to pay $50 inflation adjusted equivalent, so the kid was not necessarily rich.

Yetanfou 8y ago

You'd be amazed at how much an enterprising person can collect for nothing but some blood, sweat and ingenuity. I ended up with a room looking somewhat like that by finding and repairing stuff here and there, often dumped at the street for the garbage truck to collect. Amplifiers with blown channels? dump ' m. Television with a fried tripler (HT ladder) or HT diode? On the street! Speaker boxes with one blown driver? Get rid of it. Reel to reel deck with some bad rubber here and there? Tube radio which just sits and hums? Begone, who wants a boat anchor like that? Well, I did. It launched me on a career of 'rescuing' left-over hardware which still keeps me from buying new stuff unless absolutely necessary. While I might not be a good consumer (my father's oft-heard reaction when I spoke of my latest conquest: 'if everyone were like you the economy would crumble, just toss the rubbish and buy something new') but I don't feel this to be a prime responsibility: we're not here to support the economy, the economy exists by virtue of all our interactions. If the economy can only survive by virtue of people being wasteful the solution is not to produce more waste but to fix the economy. This will lead to some articles becoming more expensive - like they used to be - but it will also lead to less waste being produced, fixing another problem. The rapid pace of technical developments between the 50's - the era from which some of the stuff our teenage bedrooms were filled with - and now has been part of the reason for the development of modern throw-away equipment. Now that this pace has slowed down and in some cases halted or reversed (want a good compact cassette player? Buy a second-hand older model and restore it) there is often no direct incitement for replacement of 'obsolete' hardware: an amplifier from the 90's sounds just as good as one from two decades later. It would make sense to repair that older model instead of buying something new, were it not for the fact that somewhere along the line manufacturers 'forgot' to think about repairability when designing hardware, 'forgot' about providing schematic diagrams or only provided them to 'authorised' repair centres, started using hard to source components, etc. Fortunately those latter 'omissions' have been reversed for a good deal by the existence of active repair communities on the 'net ([1], [2], etc) so the curious and enterprising can still continue on their mission of learning and discovery. [1] https://www.eserviceinfo.com/ https://www.eserviceinfo.com/ [2] https://elektrotanya.com https://elektrotanya.com