Alt-BEAM Archive

Message #03567



To: beam@corp.sgi.comBR
From: "Jakub Pietracha" whraven@free.com.plBR
Date: Sat, May 22, 1999, 5:20 PM

Subject: Suspended master-slawe bicore walker.









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3568 Sun, 23 May 1999 13:39:17 +0200 (CEST) [alt-beam] Hobby dying WAS lay off Solarbotics beam@corp.sgi.com Steven Bolt On Sun, 23 May 1999 JVernonM@aol.com wrote:

---8<---
> The way I see it BEAM is one of the best ways I've seen in my
> life to get 13 year old boys interested in electronics and
> robotics.

Hear, hear.

---8<---
> What vexes me is the limited growth of the hobby side of the
> tech.

Bad news: Electronics as a hobby is dying, at least here in The
Netherlands. In the past few years, the drop has been so steep that
obtaining even fairly ordinary parts is becoming a problem.

---8<---
> BUT, it gets alittle more serious when a group of 20 kids want to
> build scout walkers for 300 a pop.

$300 is of course extreme, but I doubt that the price level in
general is the major obstacle. When I learned about electronics (as
a 6 year old), kits and components were very expensive. You had to
pay about $12 (in today's dollars) for a not so hot transistor.
Tubes were the thing then, and they were even more expensive. Yet
the hobby thrived. A peak was reached somewhere in the seventies,
when the 74XX series made all sorts of new applications possible.
After that, it went downhill. I'm not sure why. But it comes to
mind that the excitement is not what it was in the days when my dad
built the first television receiver in our street.

Whatever the cause, creative technical hobbies seem to be on the
way down, if you look past all the programming that's going on.
We may have to live with a very small niche. Growth in the short
term seems unlikely.

Best,

Steve

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# sbolt@xs4all.nl # Steven Bolt # popular science monthly KIJK #
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