Comment by st_goliath
13 hours ago
I'm pretty sure if you really want to, you could do something like this as a hobbyist with a Pentium right now.
Instead of futzing with wires on a breadboard you could simply designing a PCB up front, throw the design over the fence at JLC or PCBWay, insert coin, wait patiently at the mailbox, solder your scavenged Socket 7 onto the board.
The days of toner transfer and aquarium pumps are already long gone. Getting production quality, one-off, multi layer PCBs done as a hobbyist is dirt cheap these days, no government budgets required.
I don't know about Pentium, but there's definitely some homebrew 486 projects out there, e.g.:
https://maniek86.xyz/projects/m8sbc_486.php
> you could simply designing a PCB up front, throw the design over the fence at JLC or PCBWay, insert coin, wait patiently at the mailbox
It blows my mind that I can use free-as-in-beer Free-as-in-Speech software to design a PCB, email it to a dude in China, and get a finished working professional-looking PCB back in my hand within a week, for the price of a couple of coffees. And if I want the components stuck on too, it'll cost a little extra, maybe three coffees it costs now.
If I want it really quickly then for the price of a decent takeaway curry I can have it flown over next day. What the actual hell?
Edit: the slowest part of "next day" is when it hits the UK, and if I could guarantee it just gets delivered to DHL's Edinburgh depot I could drive down there in two hours.
The reality is that's just how cheap commodity circuit construction is, and even small shops in the US sometimes approach that low cost, and we've been paying crazy markup on electronics for decades. That dirt cheap board is so profitable it is using air freight to get back to you. It is literally burning money just for convenience, yet that is the "cheap" option.
Electronics cost a lot to manufacture in the 70s, but is entirely automated now but for "reasons" we have only seen a small part of that savings.
When you buy the "Cheap" version on AliExpress, they are still making a healthy margin, yet Americans will happily buy the exact same product off Amazon for next day shipping for 10x the cost and think they are getting a "deal"
This extends to cars as well, with the F150 costing as little as $20k to build, even with "Expensive" very unionized and well compensated labor. The higher market trims only cost a little more to make but take in far higher profit margins. How much of China's supposedly "Subsidized" car price (as if the US doesn't do anything to subsidize cars) is just a lower profit margin?
Things should be way cheaper to western consumers. Where does all that extra money go? "Marketing and administration", basically bloated executive suites, bloated middle management, and the pockets of Meta, Google, AWS, and Apple. Oh gee, those exact companies seem absurdly wealthy and are basically responsible for all economic growth in the past few decades.
> even small shops in the US sometimes approach that low cost
It's ludicrously expensive to ship things to and from the US though, and since they're now paying some insane markup because no-one understands what tariffs are the prices have got even sillier.