To me, some of the despair/nostalgia comes from how I once saw all this technology as an empowering wave for individuals to accomplish their goals, a kind of capital for the little guy.
Nowadays it feels like it's all controlled by big companies to entrap individuals in an extractive web. At best, you can only solve your problems on their terms.
There are more people accomplishing their goals now than ever before.
40 years ago you had to scrounge for some McGraw Hill or TAB books in your local library and then hope there was an electronics store within 100 miles (and there often wasn't). In the 90s there were entire categories of parts that were completely unavailable to the individual unless they were associated with a university or corporation because the only distributors that carried them only dealt with customers who had a Dun & Bradstreet number and a purchasing department to which they could send invoices: no retail sales allowed or desired.
Now there is the web and stores like Adafruit and iFixit and Digikey where you can get anything in your hands nearly instantly.
It is only slight hyperbole to suggest that there are probably more YouTube channels dedicated to smartphone repair than there were people bothering to dig up the documentation and travel to physical stores for parts to repair their old landline telephones back in the 70s and 80s.
It's easier than ever to use technologies to accomplish my goals, and the ratio of usefullness/effort was never that high. Back in 2000's, if I wanted to design something as simple as "warn me if my basement gets cold", It'd be a complex design, likely requiring a spare PC and custom protocol. Today, it's one evening project using $10 worth of parts (ESP32 + CircuitPython). If you spend a second evening, you can set up fully self-hosted hub for it, independent of any corporation (HomeAssistant).
Asside: where has this american-english prediction for adding random prepositions come from? Everyone now builds ‘out’ things instead of just building them, hates ‘on’ things instead of just disliking them from the comfort of their chair, and I was today told to switch ‘up’ a config file for a tiling window manager. I don’t remember this from the 2000s.
“Hating on” is a specific activity instead of a state of being or emotion. It’s more precisely about a temporal process.
Is the term "hating on" used to protect the person expressing hate from labeling them "a hater"?
Would also like to mention "Altex" of old in San Antonio TX. They have morphed into a computer store but used to be a really amazing electronic component store. It made me want to buy stuff just because it existed.
Feel like specialty stores are mostly dried up now. My father knew all the tool shops in San Antonio and I enjoyed just seeing the diversity of stuff to do anything (welding, electronics, fasteners, pneumatic tools, plywood, Camera Shops, etc.) I suppose there are a lot of these sorts of places but most of what I see is pretty generic consumer stuff (Home Depot, Wallmart, Amazon).
- WeirdStuff Warehouse - DIY PC computer parts, shareware floppies by the bin full, used electronic goods and components that sold inventory to ebay:outback6
- Halted/HSC - Somewhat similar to WeirdStuff but sold inventory to ebay:excess-solutions
- JDR Microdevices, which was more professional than DIY
- And there were specialized shops for vacuum tubes and particular kinds of electronic appliances, notably there were ~100 to 100's of independent IBM PC-compatible DIY computer retail shops in 1990's SF Bay Area region selling made-to-order beige box systems and DIY parts. (Back then, there was no RGB, no pane glass windows, and all computer cases were the same color of beige, with black and off-white only becoming available in the late 90's.) Not quite as fancy or organized as what is available elsewhere in the world like Shenzhen now, but more spread out and sometimes owned by hard-working, first-generation immigrant families who represented the best of America's melting pot and American sole-proprietor entrepreneurship. They were small stores put out of business by the multi-store and hypermart chains like Central Computer Systems, NCA Peripherals, Fry's Electronics, and CompUSA.
Nationally, there were:
- Heathkit - mail-order, educational, self-paced kits including ham radio, major home appliances, and test equipment like TVs and oscilloscopes
- RadioShack ("RatShack") - electronic components, soldering and hobbyist parts, many electronic kits for kids
- Fry's Electronics - many shelves of electronic components and assembly tools that never received much attention, it was mostly a convenience store if you were doing commercial work and needed something overpriced now
Why go to surplus store to fish for overstock of weird LCDs, when you can buy new one for $3, with documentation and a breakout board? Why salvage gearhead motors from industrial electronics when you can get brand-new ones for $5? And from the other side, if you've got some harmonic gearbox motor, why try sell them locally for $30 when you can get $150 on eBay?
There is no doubt a lot has been lost - those little stores had incredible deals, when some rare, high-quality parts were sold very cheap. Those $5 gear motors you buy today are much worse than that surplus store motor which was $100 new. But I also don't have to wait for six months for the right parts to appear in stores, so I think we are better off overall.
