Heathkit (was RE: partial P112 kits)

On Jun 22, 2010, at 10:58 AM, Marvin Johnston wrote: I agree that's a problem. I've faced this in my own desire to get more people interested in amateur radio. There's a lot of cool stuff going on that is easy to hop into and make some real progress, but to what end? It's very hard to get people interested in, say as an example, APRS when cell phones do everything APRS does (short messaging, geopositioning, etc.) faster, better, and cheaper in a device people already carry. Yes, APRS will likely survive a catastrophic disaster, but it's really hard to sell people on that by itself. Most people I think understand amateur radio often picks up a lot of the slack in disaster communications, but there isn't enough to get people into the front door of the hobby to keep them interested for very long unless they're a pretty hard-core geek. And even the latter get turned off, but that's an entirely different story and not really relevant to this conversation. In the classic computer and electronics context, what do we have to offer people other than an opportunity to be (in essence) a docent at a museum? Even a lot of the skills retrocomputing has to teach are increasingly irrelevant (and I know I'm going to get flak for this) in this day and age of modular and rapid prototyping programming languages. I've met "hardware people" who develop network switches that sell for tens of thousands of dollars who have never picked up a soldering iron. All they do all day long is build custom ASICs and draw vias in CAD packages. They get the assembled board with a FPGA a few hours later from the fab out back, and if there's a mistake or a design flaw it's easier and cheaper to just update the drawing and click "print" than blue-wire it. "Nobody writes in assembler anymore" is a pretty valid thing to say. Most device driver coding is done in C++ with inline assembly, often generated automatically from some long-forgotten back-end process nobody ever maintains except for one guy who's long since officially "retired" and does bug fixes on an hourly contract basis from home. Which is the $250,000 RV he purchased with his stock options money with a satellite Internet feed. (This is not a joke: I know of a Microsoft employee who's life is exactly this.) I guess retrocomputing has something to teach in that emulating long-forgotten hardware in FPGA (and other "fungible" architectures) is a fascinating project. I learned a lot about analog FM synthesis by following the efforts of those trying to implement the MOS SID chip in FPGA. But you have to have the passion for the original tech in the first place before this really becomes interesting.