Re: A Link of note

[Roy and/or Janet Miller <millers@inetnebr.com>]

Rubywand wrote:

>      The term "hobby" is frequently misused. In many cases, the explanation
> is that someone wishes to refer to a group engaged in some non-professional
> pursuit and, lacking any interest in correct usage, picks the term "hobby".
> Then, too, those who sell magazines and supplies related to some activity may
> call the activity a "hobby" in order to create an easy-to-grasp sense of
> community-- e.g. 'the magazine for widget hobbyists', 'the number one seller
> of widget hobbyist supplies', etc..
>
>     "Hi Fi" and "Stereo" were frequently refered to as "hobbies" in the
> 1950's and 1960's though, for all but a very few participants, they were
> nothing of the kind. Most of the so-called "hobbiests" built kits because
> that was the cheapest way to get decent equipment, not because they
> especially enjoyed constructing amplifiers and gluing together speaker
> cabinets. Once they had a system they liked, they used it to listen to music.
>

However, Jeff, many people just like having the opportunity to make things, or to
tinker with them. What is a shade tree mechanic but someone who loves to make his or
another's car run smoother, or faster, or whatever. And that is what many in the early
days (75-78) were, though, by no means, all.

>      There were, certainly, some hobbyists within small computing. However,
> the vast majority of those involved were genuine users. And, when you focus
> upon users of BASIC,

"Users of BASIC"? BASIC isn't an application, it's a tool for making applications. (Or
games, utilities, programing tools, etc.) Go to the library Jeff, if you don't own them
yourself, and read the Byte or Dr.Dobb's of those days, and see that even DOSs of
various sorts were rare. CP/M 1.0 was announced in the April 1976 issue of Dr. Dobbs.
That was the point of Leroy Finkel's letter, there wasn't a computer like the Apple ][
yet, one that you could buy (with disk drives), take home, and only need to know BASIC
in order to use. (Wasn't the Disk ][ released in late 1977 or early 1978?) This was
still the time of having to typing in, not a game from a magazine, but a *language*
from a magazine that you might have to enhance yourself in octal, hex or assembly, so
you could write a game or whatever.

We've come a long way baby, since then, but we wouldn't have, if those "hobbyists"
hadn't blazed the trail for us.

> the number of hobbyists is truly miniscule. If these
> users messed with hardware at all it was to have the hardware

Ok, perhaps this is the point - there were hobbyists of two varieties: hardware, and
software. If you read the literature of that day, the hardware guys wanted BASIC so
they could do something with the hardware that they worked so hard on, and the software
guys wanted "professional" tools like assemblers and debuggers so they could do "real"
programming. Not as a job, they did that all day long, but for fun - remember, much of
the software of that day was given away for free, or sold for very little (Tom
Pittman's Tiny BASIC was $5.)

Today, in the Apple ][ world we are almost back to that time - software is free or
cheap, and hardware is rare, because to create either has to be a labor of love, the
odds of making a living from new Apple ][ hardware or software is about the same as my
winning the Publisher's Clearinghouse! This is exciting, and depressing. And another
reason to do all that we can to support and encourage those few who can supply us with
new software or hardware.

> and be done
> with it. They were interested in using their computers to play games, balance
> checkbooks, write music, and create useful programs.
>
>      A computer is a tool. Using a computer may be interesting, beneficial,
> and/or entertaining but, in general, it is no more a "hobby" than using a
> lawnmower.

Tell that to shortway radio users, or CBers (and there are still some of them about you
know - because it's a hobby, as well as a tool.)

If I could only recover the hours, nay, the *days* I've lost trying to tweak my IBM
trying to gain an extra K of RAM or a .5% increase in speed....

Roy