Most electrical/electronic items (radios, TVs, washing machines, ...) used to come with a schematic, or at least a block diagram, inside the device. Similarly, published integrated circuit data sheets contained enough information to understand how the chip worked to a low-level. This changed around the 80s from memory? There wasn't a word for "open source" in electronics, as it was just the unnamed default. It was all paper based, as it predated wide-spread online distribution.
My parents bought a relatively inexpensive television in 1987 and it came with complete schematics, printed out as an addendum to the user manual. I was more excited about those than the TV itself because I had just learned to read schematics from one of the Forrest Mims books at Radio Shack a few months earlier. This was in the US and I am pretty sure it was made by Emerson.
A dumb brand name dryer we got from Home Depot a few years back still has one of these. It was a breath of fresh air to unfold it and pretty quickly determine what part was bad with a multimeter and some high school electronics education.
I've been thinking a good way to understand the 'sociology' of information sharing is the structure of capital or prestige in an ecosystem
For example, it's not an accident that software development is a very 'open' industry. You can learn anything about making a NextJS shopping cart online. Because nobody is really getting value by holding this knowledge as secret 'alpha'
On the flipside for example, academics, scientists and journalists often have very different incentives. Getting the credit for being the first to talk about an issue is what matters for their career so they are likely to be guarded about what they're working on or what their methods are
And this is why Zuck open sources LLMs; he is not really selling tokens in some infra service so keeping the output generation scarce doesn't really matter to Meta
(Joel Spolsky had an adjacent idea saying "Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements" like Billboard publishes a lot of music journalism for free but monetizes their chats/data)
Anyway, so this explains what's going on with this electronics retailer--while it is still a perspective and effort that is uncommon--publishing the schematic is not competitive with the shop unless you start manufacturing and open up another shop
We didn't have words to describe "Opensource" yet, I wrote (from the above page):
This page is designed to be a home for the Taniwha Flight Computer which
I'm building and kitting for a number of other interested people. This is
NOT a for-profit enterprise - the idea is to get a critical mass of people
up and using the same hardware so that they can write cool and interesting
code (or make cool and interesting hardware) and share it with everyone else
who's using the design.
A quick note about copyrights etc - all the stuff here is marked with my
copyright - this is something I do with everything I design to retain control
of my designs should I decide to sell them for profit in the future. However
everything in these pages, the design itself and the software that runs on it
(at least the stuff I provide) is hereby provided it for anyone's use - but I
retain ownership and copyright (even feel free to build them commercially if
you want).
You can see the gem of what later became GPL/etc there, using copyrights to retain control while releasing it to the world. Later I added:
"Open Source" is now all the rage - we've been running this project that way
for the past 4 years - so as always "feel free to steal anything on these web
pages".
There are professional versions of the Denshi block, used in engineering schools in Japan in the 80's/90's (as I recall), to lay out circuits and serve as a test-bed for student lab work:
In my case, it's just a great reminder of the 70's, and how bright and shiny the future used to seem. Its also a pretty fun little woo-hoo-bonky-boing synth toy, now and then ..
I would have to wonder if there aren't pro blocks in that store somewhere, probably in their own neatly labeled section ..
Reminds me of a vaguely similar toy you used to be able to get at Radio Shack: the "electronics project kits". Typically, a given set of circuit components would be laid out on a board (typically thick cardboard) in a frame (wood). Attached to the leads of the components are small metal springs. You used the provided wires to connect components together by bending the springs back, inserting the stripped ends of the wires between the coils of the spring, and letting the spring snap back into place. Instructions provided with the kit showed you how to connect the components to yield all sorts of interesting things, from simple circuits that could make lights blink to working radio receivers, musical instruments, etc. Some of the more sophisticated and expensive ones had ICs, and I think a few of the later ones had microcontrollers.
I got a couple of these as a kid, handed down from my parents. Quite a bit of fun to play around with. I do remember getting a snap-together circuit which was new, but it just didn't have all the cool bits and the fun little springs of the hand-me-downs.
Published schematics go back to the earliest days of radio. Electronics magazines and the Radio Amateur's Handbook are roughly a century old.
Before that, there was science. Although the rules were loosely defined, scientists were expected to provide enough detail in their papers for someone else to replicate their work. That's where I learned about open design, before I learned to program.
Into the modern age, when "code" became part of electronics projects, the magazines printed source code listings, and later required authors to provide their code for an online repository. I published a couple of those articles back in the day.
20 years ago my town had a boutique electronics store, somewhat like a Radio Shack, except they'd developed corporate sales as a revenue stream instead of pushing cellphone contracts on consumers. It carried on until the owner died last year.
I enjoy seeing boutique businesses but it's nice to see one where the core operation (not just the IP) has a shot at outlasting the founder.
Most electrical/electronic items (radios, TVs, washing machines, ...) used to come with a schematic, or at least a block diagram, inside the device. Similarly, published integrated circuit data sheets contained enough information to understand how the chip worked to a low-level. This changed around the 80s from memory? There wasn't a word for "open source" in electronics, as it was just the unnamed default. It was all paper based, as it predated wide-spread online distribution.
My parents bought a relatively inexpensive television in 1987 and it came with complete schematics, printed out as an addendum to the user manual. I was more excited about those than the TV itself because I had just learned to read schematics from one of the Forrest Mims books at Radio Shack a few months earlier. This was in the US and I am pretty sure it was made by Emerson.
A dumb brand name dryer we got from Home Depot a few years back still has one of these. It was a breath of fresh air to unfold it and pretty quickly determine what part was bad with a multimeter and some high school electronics education.
Some test instruments still come with "theory of operation" documentation. Those are tons of fun to read.
I've been thinking a good way to understand the 'sociology' of information sharing is the structure of capital or prestige in an ecosystem
For example, it's not an accident that software development is a very 'open' industry. You can learn anything about making a NextJS shopping cart online. Because nobody is really getting value by holding this knowledge as secret 'alpha'
On the flipside for example, academics, scientists and journalists often have very different incentives. Getting the credit for being the first to talk about an issue is what matters for their career so they are likely to be guarded about what they're working on or what their methods are
And this is why Zuck open sources LLMs; he is not really selling tokens in some infra service so keeping the output generation scarce doesn't really matter to Meta
(Joel Spolsky had an adjacent idea saying "Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements" like Billboard publishes a lot of music journalism for free but monetizes their chats/data)
Anyway, so this explains what's going on with this electronics retailer--while it is still a perspective and effort that is uncommon--publishing the schematic is not competitive with the shop unless you start manufacturing and open up another shop
In the mid to late 90s I was selling a rocketry flight computer kit:
http://www.taniwha.com/~paul/fc/index.html
We didn't have words to describe "Opensource" yet, I wrote (from the above page):
You can see the gem of what later became GPL/etc there, using copyrights to retain control while releasing it to the world. Later I added:Apropos open electronics, one of my most treasured toys is a Denshi Blocks electronics experiments kit, with a synthesizer chip in it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denshi_block
There are professional versions of the Denshi block, used in engineering schools in Japan in the 80's/90's (as I recall), to lay out circuits and serve as a test-bed for student lab work:
https://www.denshiblock.co.jp/whatdbk.html
(See also: https://www.denshiblock.co.jp/seihinindex.html ..)
In my case, it's just a great reminder of the 70's, and how bright and shiny the future used to seem. Its also a pretty fun little woo-hoo-bonky-boing synth toy, now and then ..
I would have to wonder if there aren't pro blocks in that store somewhere, probably in their own neatly labeled section ..
Reminds me of a vaguely similar toy you used to be able to get at Radio Shack: the "electronics project kits". Typically, a given set of circuit components would be laid out on a board (typically thick cardboard) in a frame (wood). Attached to the leads of the components are small metal springs. You used the provided wires to connect components together by bending the springs back, inserting the stripped ends of the wires between the coils of the spring, and letting the spring snap back into place. Instructions provided with the kit showed you how to connect the components to yield all sorts of interesting things, from simple circuits that could make lights blink to working radio receivers, musical instruments, etc. Some of the more sophisticated and expensive ones had ICs, and I think a few of the later ones had microcontrollers.
I got a couple of these as a kid, handed down from my parents. Quite a bit of fun to play around with. I do remember getting a snap-together circuit which was new, but it just didn't have all the cool bits and the fun little springs of the hand-me-downs.
"Open Source" is still not a word. It is a phrase, a term, maybe even a thing - but not a word!
Published schematics go back to the earliest days of radio. Electronics magazines and the Radio Amateur's Handbook are roughly a century old.
Before that, there was science. Although the rules were loosely defined, scientists were expected to provide enough detail in their papers for someone else to replicate their work. That's where I learned about open design, before I learned to program.
Into the modern age, when "code" became part of electronics projects, the magazines printed source code listings, and later required authors to provide their code for an online repository. I published a couple of those articles back in the day.
20 years ago my town had a boutique electronics store, somewhat like a Radio Shack, except they'd developed corporate sales as a revenue stream instead of pushing cellphone contracts on consumers. It carried on until the owner died last year.
I enjoy seeing boutique businesses but it's nice to see one where the core operation (not just the IP) has a shot at outlasting the founder.
This site, https://fabscene.com/ fascinates me even more
> 100% profit margin [..]
That’s not how these things work
No. I got from the article that he's saying that the purchase is sunk cost, so any sale is 100% profit. So it's correct
that means $5 part is sold for $10. It's exactly how that kind of thing works
That's actually a 50% profit margin. Also known as a 50% markup, even though you marked the price up by 100%.
It's a 50% profit margin because the profit ($5) is 50% of the selling price.
It's a 100% markup because the selling price is 100% more than the cost.
Some people might call it a 50% markup, but that's purely a deceptive tactic, or just ignorance.
but there was not a single schematic in article, just pcb view without even traces