Ben Krasnow and Simone Giertz are pretty great, but they're hackers: the kind of people who used to shop at Radio Shack and read Modern Electronics. There's a world of difference between watching Simone Giertz build hilarious contraptions and building those contraptions yourself.

Chuck is saying that 40 years ago there were so many hackers doing these things that there was a whole workforce—partly, but not entirely, a hacker workforce—selling them what they needed for their arcane hobbies. And that, today, there isn't.

You seem to suggest that average teenage wankers watching Simone Giertz's escapades is roughly equivalent to 01980s hackers buying transistors at Radio Shack to build a walkie-talkie out of. They aren't. Watching a video of someone doing something is completely different from doing it yourself.

Whole workforce supplying hackers is still here and thriving, its just based in Shenzhen.

Shenzhen (and Taipei, Wuxi, etc.) supplies the electronics for the entire world economy, which it turns out is mostly boring incompetent greyface stuff like General Motors and Cemex. They supply hackers too, but hackers are a minority of their customer base. Shenzhen's customer base isn't comparable to that of Radio Shack or Byte.

I dont understand your argument. People named Ralph are the minority of Walmart customers, therefore .. ??

The difference between eighties and now is in the eighties corporations wouldnt even talk to you, so you had to go to RadioShacks, hamventions, or live near Akihabara Electric Town. Nowadays random hacker has access to whole planets supply chain with overnight shipping and websites taking orders 24/7.

> People named Ralph are the minority of Walmart customers, therefore .. ??

Therefore Walmart doesn't have a whole workforce supplying people named Ralph.

> Nowadays random hacker has access to whole planet's supply chain with overnight shipping and websites taking orders 24/7.

Concur.