Old Computer Collecting vs Electronics Building

Marvin Johnston wrote: Because you can buy X for much less than it would cost you to build X, in fact you can probably buy X for much less than the cost of building the subset of X that you actually want. It must be very hard making a living wage fixing TVs etc. these days. You can still make money designing electronics (at least we employ some such people in the UK so I assume they earn at least enough to eat :-)) but I'm not sure that this will continue to be the case for much longer. The same goes for software engineers like me. There's nothing that we do that could not in principle be done almost anywhere else in the world - and there are plenty of places where it is cheaper to hire workers than in the UK. I'm sure that argument must be pretty obvious to most people (perhaps not to teenagers, but certainly their parents must know and the vibes will filter through). I do not buy that argument either. Most people never even open the box up so the size of the components is not something they know about! For that matter, most people do not fix their washing machines or dishwashers or vacuum cleaners ... and none of those (that I've had to play with) have small components in them. Antonio -- Antonio carlini arcarlini at iee.org