There were all sorts of electronic hobbyists. Hams probably dominated the category as they were a serious bunch simply because you had to get an FCC license to play in that arena. They built their own transmitters, receivers, antennas, keyers, test equipment, and lots of other accessories. There were also audio hobbyists who dabbled in hi-fi and stereo equipment, speakers, etc. Radio-controlled airplanes and boats were also popular. And one unique category of electronics hobbyists was that bunch who could fix not only their own TV sets, but their neighbor’s as well. Take the tubes down to the drug store, test them, buy new ones, and away you go. And I suppose you could put CBers into this category...the breaker, breaker…10-4 good buddy crowd.
In short, electronic hobbyists built things either from scratch, from plans, or a kit. They made accessories, gadgets, toys, and all sorts of other entertaining things. It was a satisfying process to see what you made actually work or solve some useful problem. And you learned a little more each time you did it.
So What Happened to the Hobbyist?
The hobbyist has not disappeared entirely. But the ranks have thinned considerably. I suspect that today there are probably less than a quarter of the hobbyists there used to be. My best guess is that the hobby era peaked sometime in the 1980s. Most of the magazines died out by the early 1990s—the same time most of the kit companies started to fade away. The demise of those businesses directly affected the number of current and future hobbyists and engineers.
The number one reason why the electronic hobbyist has declined in number is...the integrated circuit. If you are not buying this, consider the following. In the beginning, ICs made electronic hobbying fun and productive. You could build ever larger and more complex things without extensive knowledge. But ICs, on their way to fulfilling Moore's law over the years, got smaller in size (but with larger transistor counts). Digital speeds increased from a few MHz to over hundreds of MHz and today many GHz. Analog circuits also got higher performance and operated at higher frequencies. Packages got smaller and the ICs with pins for through-hole PC boards (PCBs) have evaporated. Surface mount ICs are the norm today, as are surface mount discretes that are about the size of a piece of rice.
Have you ever tried to breadboard a circuit or build a project with surface mount parts? Fun isn't it? You need tweezers, a magnifying glass, and a tiny heat-controlled soldering iron. And with pin spacings of a mm or less, it is easy to short out a few pins or miss a pin entirely. And how do you solder a ball grid array IC? Yes, there are ways to breadboard with these parts. Neal Greenberg of SchmartBOARD sent me a few samples of their breadboard products that really facilitate the soldering of surface mount parts for experimentation. (www.schmartboard.com.) This size and build problem was foremost in killing home built projects. Even today, the few electronic experimenters still around routinely use many of the parts from yesteryear with pins that can be soldered or plugged into breadboarding sockets. Why are there so many 555 timers, 741 op amps, and 7400 TTL projects even today when in real modern electronic products these parts have disappeared long ago?
Another problem is that as ICs got larger in scale (not size), it became more complex to make a product. Instead of simple projects you could build whole systems. That left many of the novices in the dust, as there were few real engineering types willing build the big systems.
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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