We can now buy an Arduino board for the price of a computer game, and make a flying drone. Even with a small camera or some sensors if you want. Or create some small robots with all the motors and sensors that you want, custom 3d printed.
My son is now 13 and doing STEM. I only wish I had access to all the things that they can now do for cheap, especially all the robotics and drone stuff. Plus, the amount of info on the internet is amazing and quickly accessible anywhere.
I agree that the old days were a lot of fun, but if I had to choose, I would want to be 13 nowadays instead of the 80s or 90s.
I'm pretty sure you could do this 20 years ago, there just hadn't been that wave of marketing around microcontrollers as a hobby that happened around the time of Make magazine. $2 for a PIC and $45 for a programmer, maybe? Waiting excitedly for the next issue of Nuts & Volts? Idly flipping through the Jameco and Small Parts catalogs? Toolboxes filled with TTL?
The internet is certainly an advantage, but it also ain't too new.
edit: randomly posting the Small Parts catalog so we can reflect on and celebrate what was lost https://web.archive.org/web/20160323004150/http://www.smallp...
NO MINIMUM ORDER
Also, a shout out to American Science & Surplus, off to the suburbs after 84 years.
https://blockclubchicago.org/2021/10/13/american-science-sur...
But as a late 70s Gen Xer, I would never trade living through that transition period from pre-Internet to Internet. You can't pay to have had that experience or perspective, and what transpired through those years from BBSes to pre-Web to Web adoption, from technological and sociological standpoints, was _insane_.
(Yeah, there was radio shack and Heathkit, but the barriers to entry are MUCH smaller today)
That happened in the 80s.
Sure, we didn't have "drones" in the 80s, since the battery tech and digital integration wasn't there yet to make it feasible. There were radio controlled cars with digital PCM signals, servos for steering, and heavy 6 or 7 cell NiCd battery packs. There were also radio controlled aircraft, but they were generally using an internal-combustion engine, unless they were gliders. These ranged from toy to rather extravagant hobby depending on the size and capability. My neighbor would fly his glider, which had a roughly 2-3 foot wingspan, for what seemed like hours on thermals on a slope behind our houses.
Edit to add: I don't remember the details, but I believe that he told us the radio control was the most expensive part and not much different from what people used in the fancier car kits. The rest was cheap and easily replaced, which was necessary to be light but also to be able to repair after inevitable crashes. Think of a vacuum-formed plastic skin filled with expanded foam, a bit like the structure of a surfboard but with much lower strength.
As a kid I sometimes went to a RC airfield here close by. Those things were crazy expensive. And then we're not even talking about model helicopters yet. Those things were not on batteries but on gasoline. As a kid I dreamed of having one, but those were just too expensive to give as a toy to a kid. Nowadays? Buy a drone 'helicopter' for $20. It's really crazy if you compare this to the 90's.
Drones that self hover were not even remotely possible. Or at least not as far as I know, unless you know more than me. And drones with camera's? No way!
> The internet is certainly an advantage, but it also ain't too new.
I remember when as a kid I got stuck programming. No internet, no StackOverflow... Good luck! In a sense it was cool to find solutions yourself, but it definitely wasn't quick! :)
Don't give up on tech and keep an open mind. It's true that flying drones are not exciting to you, but flying a drone could be a first step in finding something more interesting to do with drones.
Boredom is functional. It can be a guide towards more interesting things so as long as you don't let it run the show. Tolerate it and follow (intelligently) where it takes you, don't avoid it.
I don't know how helpful this will be to you, but it bothered me to see people dismiss your interest because you value doing something unique. Those same judgements held me back for years.
Was this the reason I loved tech? No, that's the reason I DID tech. The reason I loved tech is because I believed that tech will make our lives exponentially better. And up to a certain point, it did...
As you mention, computers can become "orders of magnitude more capable" simply by shrinking to a smaller form factor. We're about to have smartphones that are fully usable as computers, or smart watches that you can run free OS's and homebrew applications on.
> Then in the late 90s there was the Internet, with the promise that you could connect to anyone around the world and the potential to really bring the world together.
There's still plenty of projects trying to do that kind of thing. Big Tech social media is only the most popular part of the Internet, you're mostly free to ignore it if you like.
> Ok, those couldn't land again, but technological progress has been more of a crawl there (with an unnecessary detour into a dead end called "Space Shuttle").
The Space Shuttle was not a dead end, it had all sorts of cool capabilities that we're only now getting back with the SpaceX Starship. And rockets that land again are a big deal because they radically change the equation of how much it costs to launch things into space.
He talks about functionality. Not power. Yes, computers are more powerful now. But the point is that old computers were way more flexible and "powerful" in an usability sense. New computers are full of arbitrary (and natural (1)) barriers to stop you from having full control of your pocket CPU.
(1) The natural additional barrier is also complexity. Early computers were simple. Some hobbyist could write a system from scratch just by having some knowledge about computers and electronics. Now you have a lot more factors, an OS, a plethora of drivers and a browser that's closer to a VM than a HTML parser.
> There's still plenty of projects trying to do that kind of thing. Big Tech social media is only the most popular part of the Internet, you're mostly free to ignore it if you like.
You are right. But that kind of connection is disappointing to our 20 year old geek self. We (naively) wanted more people to become computer literates. Instead, we got algorithms and fake news.
Arguably, we got both. Even basic computer literacy is a huge value added right now. Journalists are telling coal miners to "learn to code" if they want a job, and being told to "learn to code" in return. Tim Apple is expressly saying that every kid should learn to code. This is astounding from a 1980s and 1990s perspective.
It delivered lots of pork, but at the cost of actual progress.
I’ll admit I enjoyed the exclusivity that my interests evolved into, but I definitely wish I had more people around me to share my interest in technology when I was younger.
In a way I think I grew into this expectation of exclusivity, as that was the only way my adolescent self could tell myself it was a cool hobby.
Age might play a factor in this equation, as others are saying. I say this because I have found enjoyment in simplicity more than complexity these days, and I’m told that’s something that happens with age. Writing a website that runs purely on html+ css, text based communication (as in not slack or discord), and things that I can work on for a few days and complete. I’ve taken a recent interest in sailing. My former self wanted to take on massive undertakings of complexity that required months or years of planning and doing to accomplish. To go on a bit of a tangent, I remember having an idea years ago to find a way to build a computer into a boat which would take real-time measurements of the water and weather conditions. These days I’m interested in reading my surroundings to understand the environment.
In terms of tech that would excite a geeky kid, I think it's more like "you can now buy a $1 microcontroller that's as powerful as desktop PC from 30 years ago". Which is pretty exciting as it means you can throw computing power at all sorts of real world automated which wasn't feasible for a hobbyist before.
TL;DR The modern equivalent of a programmable calculator is an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi not a smartphone.
Confining more strictly to $1.00, STM32F030F4P6 (48MHz 32-bit M0) is in spitting distance to a 386 or 20MHz 68030 for some workloads. (50 MHz 486-DX2 was introduced in ‘92, but the typical desktop PC of 1992 was much lower spec.)
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/embedded-microcon...
To compete with a high end 486 desktop from 1992 you might have to pay a bit more than $1, particularly if you want floating point.
I grew up as a eighties tech geek kid. I learned BASIC on a SHARP programmable calculator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-1403), then moved on to an Atari 800, then to an Amiga, and finally to a PC. Each of these machines was orders of magnitude more capable than the previous one - you don't have that anymore nowadays. Then in the late 90s there was the Internet, with the promise that you could connect to anyone around the world and the potential to really bring the world together. Well, that didn't quite turn out the way 20 year old me imagined unfortunately. Of course, technological progress is still going on, but it's more "your smartphone can now do what your desktop PC did 20 years ago, or your laptop did 10 years ago". SpaceX rockets look practically indistinguishable from rockets that flew 50-70 years ago. Ok, those couldn't land again, but technological progress has been more of a crawl there (with an unnecessary detour into a dead end called "Space Shuttle"). Same with self-driving cars and other potentially exciting stuff.