4 ms·

Electronics has gotten cheaper though. I bought my first PDA more than 15 years ago. It was second hand and still cost me something like £200. Last year I bough

Electronics has gotten cheaper though. I bought my first PDA more than 15 years ago. It was second hand and still cost me something like £200. Last year I bought my son a Kindle Fire to play with on long drives and that cost me something like £40 in the Black Friday sales and frankly it does a lot more than my PDA ever could - not just technical capability but also software availability. Plus finding cheap or free software for the PDA would mean turning to less legal avenues where as tablets these days are full of cheap and free software. Even the ZX Spectrum, for those unfamiliar: it is a 30 year old British micro computer designed around being _cheap_, was £125 of "old" money. Now compare that to a Raspberry Pi. Heck you can even get a wide choice of budget laptops for the same price as what the Spectrum was (if you take inflation into account). So I wouldn't say people are financially better of now than we were 30 or 40 years ago. I just think the financial barrier for entry into electronics has been lowered.

bhaak 9y ago
I wonder what PDA you are referring to. 15 years ago would be the heyday of the Palm and there, lots of software was free or even open source. I certainly didn't need to buy any software back then to fill that little productivity machine. BTW, I was much more productive on the Palm than on modern smartphone devices. For example note-taking was much better with a stylus than with a touch interface.
- laumars 9y ago
  This was a proper PDA rather than a smart phone (I refuse to accept what Apple "invented" smart phones). So a large screened Windows CE device with a stylus. Maybe I was looking in the wrong places but there didn't seem to be much free stuff for Win CE back in 2002.
  - bhaak 9y ago
    WinCE devices were much more business oriented than Palm, probably because they had in the beginning a much smaller market share. So your experience was likely representative for this platform. I completely forgot that they were around at that time.
    - laumars 9y ago
      I didn't get the impression it was more business oriented than Palm. I mean CE certainly had productivity tools like a cut down version of Office and support for Active sync (which I hated). I think the real problem was Windows PDAs of that era didn't even share a common CPU so you'd have multiple versions of software targeting different chipsets. I'm pretty sure that would have put a lot of developers off. But there were a few gems on the platform, like Tomb Raider (which actually played really well). I might had a dig around and see if I've still got it. Might be a fun device to repurpose.
- learc83 9y ago
  The Note 8 has a pretty nice stylus. Better than any stylus I ever had on a Windows CE device (never owned anything from Palm, so I can't really comment on that).
TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
Electronics has gotten cheaper, but a lot less DIY. The UK had a huge DIY computing, hifi, and music hardware scene in the 70s and 80s. Even with DIY, the products weren't as cheap as they are today. But the DIY element made them more accessible than professional equipment, and far more educational. For reasons I don't understand [1], only the UK and US had this scene. You can find copies of kit-promoting magazines like Electronics Today International online, and the Canadian and Australian issues were a lot less music-oriented than the UK editions. Even Adafruit etc are lightweight compared to some of the 70s/80s DIY, which needed analog design skills and a willingness to build your own unsafe DIY power supplies. [1] My guess is the UK had some very early synth startups like EMS and a solid hifi scene. When EMS folded some of their designers needed new work and there was enough interest in kit synths to keep them busy for a few years. Likewise with hifi.
- laumars 9y ago
  Yeah I really miss the DIY aspect. But I wonder if that's partly down to electronics on the whole getting cheaper meaning there's a lot less people getting into DIY as a cheaper route into the scene. That said, I have also noticed the brands have largely won the consumer war and people seem far more willing to drop cash into Apple / Sony / Samsung / etc because their hardware has a desirable aesthetics. However that might also be a symptom of the electronics industry going mainstream.
- blattimwind 9y ago
  > For reasons I don't understand [1], only the UK and US had this scene. Germany has had (and still has) it as well.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    NL did too, Belgium and France did too. You couldn't walk two blocks without stumbling across an electronics parts store.
- VLM 9y ago
  Elektuur, now called Elektor, was popular in central Europe in the 70s. The ham radio people and strictly non-ham radio people like to pretend the other doesn't exist although they do nearly the same hobby, and amateur radio is much larger, more active, and richer (in the sense of more stuff and more expensive capable stuff) ... Funkamateur from Germany and some title in kanji that I can't enter on this keyboard from the Japan Amateur Radio League have been published for most of a century and are pretty active. There is an uncanny valley effect. German schematic diagrams are full of "R" as a decimal place, rare in the 80s metric prefixes (cut it out with the nanofarads plz) and swapping periods and commas in long numbers. And there was something unusual about European scientific notation that I don't remember. Also there is more total electronic hobby and electronic kit activity and sales now than at any time in history, despite endless accurate yet misleading claims that since the death of the Heathkit company no individual company has come close to monopolizing 90% of kit sales. No slice of the pie today is nearly as large as heathkits slice of the pie, but the pie overall is vastly larger.

bhaak 9y ago

I wonder what PDA you are referring to. 15 years ago would be the heyday of the Palm and there, lots of software was free or even open source. I certainly didn't need to buy any software back then to fill that little productivity machine. BTW, I was much more productive on the Palm than on modern smartphone devices. For example note-taking was much better with a stylus than with a touch interface.

laumars 9y ago
This was a proper PDA rather than a smart phone (I refuse to accept what Apple "invented" smart phones). So a large screened Windows CE device with a stylus. Maybe I was looking in the wrong places but there didn't seem to be much free stuff for Win CE back in 2002.
- bhaak 9y ago
  WinCE devices were much more business oriented than Palm, probably because they had in the beginning a much smaller market share. So your experience was likely representative for this platform. I completely forgot that they were around at that time.
  - laumars 9y ago
    I didn't get the impression it was more business oriented than Palm. I mean CE certainly had productivity tools like a cut down version of Office and support for Active sync (which I hated). I think the real problem was Windows PDAs of that era didn't even share a common CPU so you'd have multiple versions of software targeting different chipsets. I'm pretty sure that would have put a lot of developers off. But there were a few gems on the platform, like Tomb Raider (which actually played really well). I might had a dig around and see if I've still got it. Might be a fun device to repurpose.
learc83 9y ago
The Note 8 has a pretty nice stylus. Better than any stylus I ever had on a Windows CE device (never owned anything from Palm, so I can't really comment on that).

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago

Electronics has gotten cheaper, but a lot less DIY. The UK had a huge DIY computing, hifi, and music hardware scene in the 70s and 80s. Even with DIY, the products weren't as cheap as they are today. But the DIY element made them more accessible than professional equipment, and far more educational. For reasons I don't understand [1], only the UK and US had this scene. You can find copies of kit-promoting magazines like Electronics Today International online, and the Canadian and Australian issues were a lot less music-oriented than the UK editions. Even Adafruit etc are lightweight compared to some of the 70s/80s DIY, which needed analog design skills and a willingness to build your own unsafe DIY power supplies. [1] My guess is the UK had some very early synth startups like EMS and a solid hifi scene. When EMS folded some of their designers needed new work and there was enough interest in kit synths to keep them busy for a few years. Likewise with hifi.

laumars 9y ago
Yeah I really miss the DIY aspect. But I wonder if that's partly down to electronics on the whole getting cheaper meaning there's a lot less people getting into DIY as a cheaper route into the scene. That said, I have also noticed the brands have largely won the consumer war and people seem far more willing to drop cash into Apple / Sony / Samsung / etc because their hardware has a desirable aesthetics. However that might also be a symptom of the electronics industry going mainstream.
blattimwind 9y ago
> For reasons I don't understand [1], only the UK and US had this scene. Germany has had (and still has) it as well.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  NL did too, Belgium and France did too. You couldn't walk two blocks without stumbling across an electronics parts store.
VLM 9y ago
Elektuur, now called Elektor, was popular in central Europe in the 70s. The ham radio people and strictly non-ham radio people like to pretend the other doesn't exist although they do nearly the same hobby, and amateur radio is much larger, more active, and richer (in the sense of more stuff and more expensive capable stuff) ... Funkamateur from Germany and some title in kanji that I can't enter on this keyboard from the Japan Amateur Radio League have been published for most of a century and are pretty active. There is an uncanny valley effect. German schematic diagrams are full of "R" as a decimal place, rare in the 80s metric prefixes (cut it out with the nanofarads plz) and swapping periods and commas in long numbers. And there was something unusual about European scientific notation that I don't remember. Also there is more total electronic hobby and electronic kit activity and sales now than at any time in history, despite endless accurate yet misleading claims that since the death of the Heathkit company no individual company has come close to monopolizing 90% of kit sales. No slice of the pie today is nearly as large as heathkits slice of the pie, but the pie overall is vastly larger.