Electronics used to be one of the greatest hobbies ever. There were literally hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of people who used to play around with electronics as an avocation or part-time interest and activity. There were at least a dozen magazines supporting this group and plenty of parts and kits suppliers to keep them happy. Kids learned electricity and electronics in school. As a result, when they ended up getting the bug, they ended up not only adopting electronics as a hobby, but also made it into a career. You don’t see too mach of that going on anymore. So what the devil happened to the electronic hobbyist?
I started playing around with old radios in junior high and got interested in ham radio. I built the classic crystal radio and was able to hear a couple of local AM stations. My next-door neighbor and I strung a two wire cable we found in a vacant lot between our two houses and used our ear phones to make a simple telephone...by accident. What a thrill. Then my dad gave me his old Hallicrafters S-38 shortwave radio. That really did it. I was hooked. A local police officer gave code and basic electronics lessons to my neighbor and I after school, and we eventually got our novice ham licenses. We built tube transmitters to go with our receivers and had a ball on CW. I eventually went on and learned electronics in college, got a degree, and became first a technician, then an engineer. And the rest, as they say, is history.
I suspect that my background is similar to many of yours. But that path from hobbyist to engineer is disappearing—if it hasn’t already dissolved entirely. The hobby aspect of electronics seems to have gone away and thereby virtually eliminated one of the best sources of new engineers and techs. But why has this happened?
What Is a Hobbyist?
First, let me clarify what an electronic hobbyist is. I define an electronic hobbyist as someone who enjoys learning more about electronics by building, and in some cases designing, electronic devices. In the days of tubes and discrete transistors and components you could easily build a radio receiver, transmitter, or some other gadget for a few dollars. If you couldn't design it yourself, you could go to one of the many monthly magazines like Popular Electronics, Radio-Electronics, Elementary Electronics, Electronics World, QST, and Nuts & Volts and find a project of interest. And for those who didn't want to venture out too far on their own, there were the kit manufacturers. The king of kits was Heathkit, of course, but there were a bunch of others way back when like Eico and Allied (Knight kits) and a whole slew of smaller ones.
Typical hobbyist projects ranged from a few simple parts to really elaborate complete pieces of equipment like a power supply, audio amplifier, communications receiver, or photo timer. When ICs came along in the 1970s, experimenting really took off. You could build even more elaborate devices with better performance, thanks to op amps and digital ICs. Experimenters went wild. At least 108 projects were based on the 555 IC timer. Later in the 1970s, the microprocessor came along and the personal computer kit came on the market. That set off a whole new wave of experimenting and started a whole new industry. Another batch of magazines like Byte, Interface Age, Kilobaud, Creative Computing and a few others offered lots of projects to build and ushered in a whole new dimension...software and programming.. Many electronic hobbyists became computer hobbyists—what we called hackers back then.
I think you should get over your hatred of C. It is a language tool that is truly optimized for larger systems. It is a real tool even though it is a "language tool" as is Assembler. A larger pipe wrench can make a large pipe turn when a smaller one might not accomplish a thing. The right tool makes the job easier for the worker, but more importantly enables the worker to do the job more effectively. I can't think of a language that had as much professional thought put into it than C. It is a tool crafted by it's users for it's users. It offers portability to other processors or MCU's. The programming effort you put forward on one type of MCU can easily be used on another with minimal or no changes to your code. Assembler is ideal for small well defineable tasks, but if you want to integrate many small well defined tasks into a whole system as you were speaking of then C is the wrench. If you want to go to even larger systems with alot of people involved in the programming (say a computer game with wild graphics) then C++. I understand this "hatred", I used to hate C++ till I learned a little of it and now see the limitations of C.
Anonymous -September 06, 2009
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