As a kid in the 90s, the ultimate fate of all appliances and electronic devices in my house was to be disassembled and stripped by me, their components buried in deep drawers for use in some imagined future invention, and occasionally reincarnated in the form of some makeshift radio or blinking LED.
I remember visiting repair shops for our aging color TV with my dad and being awed by the tables and shelves full of exotic-looking vacuum tubes, exposed CRTs, and dangerous-looking coils, and what I imagined to be the sorcerer-like skills of the man behind the counter who could divine their inner workings.
On weekends I would cajole my parents to drive me to the numerous electronic surplus stores, where I would marvel at tallboy-sized capacitors, which my father wisely prohibited me from buying.
Radio Shack was in its prime with walls covered in DIP chips and those "Electronic Project Lab" kits, of which I aspired to own the 300-in-1 version for $65 with a real breadboard and digital ICs. I vividly remember the birthday when I finally received it. I could seldom get the more complicated digital designs to work, which I've since learned was likely because breadboards are terrible for digital logic, but I was nevertheless entertained for countless hours.
Those were some of the most formative experiences of my childhood, and I too feel sad that they're becoming a thing of the past. You can open a modern electronic device and there's hardly anything in there that you can disassemble and re-use. And even if you could, the magic doesn't live there. When I was a kid, everything a device did was physically manifested in the arrangement of its parts. Now it only exists in firmware, invisible and inaccessible to the curious eye.
I suppose every generation feels nostalgia for the lost world of its childhood. But like you, I can't help but feel sad that no more children will get to experience that.
As a kid in the 90s, the ultimate fate of all appliances and electronic devices in my house was to be disassembled and stripped by me, their components buried in deep drawers for use in some imagined future invention, and occasionally reincarnated in the form of some makeshift radio or blinking LED.
I remember visiting repair shops for our aging color TV with my dad and being awed by the tables and shelves full of exotic-looking vacuum tubes, exposed CRTs, and dangerous-looking coils, and what I imagined to be the sorcerer-like skills of the man behind the counter who could divine their inner workings.
On weekends I would cajole my parents to drive me to the numerous electronic surplus stores, where I would marvel at tallboy-sized capacitors, which my father wisely prohibited me from buying.
Radio Shack was in its prime with walls covered in DIP chips and those "Electronic Project Lab" kits, of which I aspired to own the 300-in-1 version for $65 with a real breadboard and digital ICs. I vividly remember the birthday when I finally received it. I could seldom get the more complicated digital designs to work, which I've since learned was likely because breadboards are terrible for digital logic, but I was nevertheless entertained for countless hours.
Those were some of the most formative experiences of my childhood, and I too feel sad that they're becoming a thing of the past. You can open a modern electronic device and there's hardly anything in there that you can disassemble and re-use. And even if you could, the magic doesn't live there. When I was a kid, everything a device did was physically manifested in the arrangement of its parts. Now it only exists in firmware, invisible and inaccessible to the curious eye.
I suppose every generation feels nostalgia for the lost world of its childhood. But like you, I can't help but feel sad that no more children will get to experience that.
They dabble in pulling apart culture.