The Hobby Computer Culture

I will never understand people who can't think of anything to do if they didn't have a job.

Let me ask you a question and perhaps it will help?

What if there was something wonderful and curious that you could explore and someone else would actually pay you money while you were exploring that thing?

I've met a number of folks in research who "work" at a University doing their research and even though the pay sucks love what they are doing. You could pay them nothing and they would still love doing it. They might be forced to do something else if they didn't have enough money to live on, but even if they had millions and millions they wouldn't be doing anything differently.

Keith, the guy I was renting the room from, was in the latter position. He didn't "have" to work, and didn't "have" to work at IBM to work on computers, but in doing so he got to satisfy his curiosity and got to work on much better equipment than if he were funding it himself. Is that something understandable?

FWIW, in the Bay Area we call this "failing" at retirement :-) Failing is in quotes because if you choose to go back to work is it really a failure? Had a great conversation with Guido von Rossum when he decided to 'un-retire' and go "work" for Microsoft. There are a lot of things to like about the office, a community, a continual stream of interesting problems to solve, Etc. And knowing that if you didn't like it you can just stop really helps in dealing with people who would attempt to assert power over you.

I agree with you in principle. At the same time, analysis paralysis and lack of focus can be problems. When you can do 1000 things, what will you pick? Also, are you going to persevere through bumps if you could switch to other 999 things?

For many people, mucking around with computers is a hobby that happens to pay pretty well.

Than working at IBM in peak-mainframe era? I could not imagine a more exciting place to be at that time!

Lmao, if I had 4 million bucks I would probably be maintaining some old 70s era mainframe trying to get it to do dumb shit like messing with stocks.

This guy got to do it AND got paid.

Sounds about right. I certainly thought it was "infinite" money at the time.

My uncle is Paul Terrell, the owner of that Byte Shop. He showed me the photo and told me who was in the window. But I don't have an independent verification of this -- dunno, maybe Captain Crunch is a lurker here?

You might like Evan Doorbell's YT channel then – he has a lot of old tapes from his misspent youth traveling the world on Ma Bell's dime, and has posted a lot of videos explaining it all for a generation (like mine) without any frame of reference.

https://www.youtube.com/@evandoorbell4278

Author here. Thank you for the reference, this is very helpful. The name "Colonel Whitney" came from a 1984 Stan Veit article: https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/computer_magazine_madness...

Obviously he misremembered the name. I wasn't able to find other references to corroborate more details of the scam, but of course now I know that I wasn't searching for the correct name.

My father's stereo system was installed in our living room, a Heathkit with discrete components, probably a tube-transistor hybrid type. I did not witness him in the process of assembling it.

But in those days, there were the trade magazines on the newsstand, the electronics shops and clubs where guys hung out to talk about calculators and radios and jukeboxes and pinball machines.

It looks like MITS was already into calculators and model rocketry. And getting featured on the cover of Popular Electronics gave them a boost. Undoubtedly, plenty of ads in the back for mail-order kits, and then you'd be signed up for ever-more specialized company catalogs.

It was the same when I collected vinyl records and built computers. Find the right trade magazines and the crusty old guys tending storefronts, and you could learn about the next big thing.

Of course there were also comic books sold to gullible children with catalogs and ads in the back pages. Snapping gum, whoopee cushions, spy cameras, and X-ray Specs. You could count on being disappointed by purchasing something on that list, but it was often a matter of clever misrepresentation by marketing blurbs and a sketch.

One night 8-year-old me phoned in an order for a "remote control hovercraft". It came "collect-on-delivery" which Mom didn't like. The hovercraft was not radio-controlled as I had imagined. It had a flashlight-like handle that held 2x "D" cells and a motor that rotated a thin cable. The cable stretched several feet to a "hovercraft" with a light plastic hull and fan blades. So you could walk it around the room like a marionette as the downdraft held it suspended a little bit.

Only a few years later, I began receiving mail from AARP. The hovercraft sellers had sold them my address and pseudonym. We could tell, because the hovercraft-selling lady had misspelled my first name. Good times.

> that's where the term "Craftsman home" came from

FWIW, this etymology is incorrect. The American Craftsman architecture style was a derivative of the British Arts & Crafts movement, post Victorian era.

Timeline is roughly: Arts & Crafts circa 1880, American Craftsman circa 1900.

The Sears Craftsman brand was created in 1927.

Yes, but there was still fraud. You didn't send your money away to just any random ad you ran across. Sears was VERY well known. And if you didn't know the company or its reputation, you likely wouldn't send your money away to buy something without at _least_ hearing a positive experience from someone you know and trust.

MITS was not unknown, but they were not a household name. And any microcomputer at that time was quite an expensive toy. Costing an amount that a lot of people could not really afford to just lose.

Yeah but Sears is a reputable company selling reputable brands that became so ubiquitous as to enter into the lexicon.

That's miles apart from some fly by night catalogue with ads from Jim Bob selling what was only a decades prior the domain of science fiction and corporate offices.

Like look at it another way. If some fly by night website was selling what they claimed was a desktop replicator for $5000 and someone posted it on Hackernews the top comment would be about how the website isn't responsive and the language is in broken english and somewhere towards the bottom would be a flame war started by some curious person saying "I'm gonna go for it. I just bought it."

That looks really cool and I like that it isn’t a website. There’s a Whitfield Diffie quote I’ve mentioned a few times on HN. It’s from Ellen Ullman’s book Life in Code[1]:

> We were slaves to the mainframe! [Diffie] said. Dumb terminals! That's all we had. We were powerless under the big machine's unyielding central control. Then we escaped to the personal computer, autonomous, powerful. Then networks. The PC was soon rendered to be nothing but a "thin client," just a browser with very little software residing on our personal machines, the code being on network servers, which are under the control of administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net, our machines having become dumb terminals again.

Applications like yours claw back a little of that power. Very nice.

[1]:https://archive.org/details/life-in-code-a-personal-history-...