He was able to tinker with a radio at age of 10, in 1940. I had my first electronic at 19, in 2003, growing up in India.
Today, almost anyone in the world can have access to the latest tech easily. Great minds were there and are everywhere in the world, they just didn't have access to resources. Think how fast the research monopoly of US is going to shrink.
Growing up in a Third-World country, I was tinkering with electronics at age 10 and built my first crystal radio at age 11 from junk parts. Dumpster-diving isn't hard as long as you don't mind the occasional dead dog.
I've found entire, functional computers thrown out. My first web server was a 386 built from dumpster-dived parts, quickly upgraded to a 486 as I found new stuff. I still have those computers, too. It's amazing how wasteful people are with tech. People, please don't throw out working computers if you can avoid it. Take them to a thrift shop or a specialized place that will fix them up and sell them, like Free Geek. Post an ad on Craigslist "free" section.
A year and a half ago, I found an entire HP Elite 8300 standing by the dumpster in the rain. It was only missing a hard disk (likely removed to be shredded).
I brought it in, checked it for rust or damage, let it dry for several days, and ordered a hard drive for it. It runs fine, and I use it as a repo/build server.
Nice. I have an SGI Indigo that I will probably never be able to use again because I forgot its login credentials years ago. And I think the monitor was proprietary to SGI and I tossed because it took up too much room.
Then again, I could probably find a downloadable OS for it somewhere online.
Unless it's been secured, you can probably boot using the miniroot on the installation media, go to the password file and clear the root password and save.
Restart that Indigo, and log on as root, no password.
When doing various services on these machines, I would keep a drive ready to boot miniroot. Would clear the root password, archive the hash, then do the work, put it back and on to the next gig. Most of the time nobody even knew what that password was.
Took {big company IT} quite a while to finally call and ask how those services were getting done...
You can definitely boot that SGI in single-user mode or off a bootable OS and read the passwd file. Just found a guide on resetting the root password on an SGI machine[0]. Someone probably would have paid multiple $hundred for that monitor :(
My early years were in rural India, so even Motorcycles were rare to sight. However, I did my dumpster diving with Books and Magazines, and collected a lot of relics.
Apart from the dead dogs my experience in a first world country was quite similar. But for some reason I'm more impressed with you, probably because here in NL electronics were relatively easy to come by because people were throwing away older generating electronics with great regularity to buy something newer.
Whereas I would expect that in the 3rd world by the time you got your fingers on it it must have been technically beyond salvage.
Thank you. I found the same to be true, though. Most people don't know how to repair radios, or don't know anyone who can do it, so if it's anything more complex than a broken wire, it ended up in the trash. At least the cheap, handheld transistor radios did. Happily, everything was through-hole in the 70's so parts were easy to remove :-)
Yes, thank god for through hole parts, otherwise I don't think I ever would have made it this far. VLSI is killing poor kids' ability to get started with electronics.
What did you do your soldering with?
My first soldering iron(s) were simply screwdrivers in the stove :)
I even recycled the solder but it took a while to understand that you need flux as well as solder to make a good joint.
I don't think heating up a screwdriver ever occurred to me!
My first soldering iron was huge! I don't remember who gave it to me, but it was clearly not for electronics. It had a small wooden handle and a tip that looked like a large, bent flathead screwdriver. It could remove parts, but not much else.
Ha! gotta love google. It looked something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Soldering-Handle-Chisel-Point-Copper/...
Thinking back, my grandfather was a carpenter and left a shop full of tools when he died, so it's possible that it used to be his.
I remember asking for a real soldering iron as a Christmas or birthday present and getting a low-wattage one since they didn't cost that much. Until then, everything was held together by wrapping wire onto leads.
The strange thing is that I remember having a small soldering iron, but I don't remember ever having actual solder.
Interesting thread this. You made me re-live a whole bunch of my past and I noticed something funny (or at least, I think it is funny): to this day I can't help myself, when I walk by a dumpster or the garbage before it is picked up I am still scanning for TVs, tape recorders etc. It's so automatic that if not for this thread I would not have caught on to what that was all about, it's simply a habit.
And I still can't stand waste.
One day we will look back to this age and wonder: how on earth could we have been so wasteful that perfectly good stuff ended up in a landfill.
That soldering iron of yours looks like the perfect tool for some SMD work.
I recall those in the hands of stained glass workers, either that or gas heated ones.
My first upgrade from a screwdriver looked like this:
Which actually worked well enough for tube based electronics, (not even hole through, just built up in the air on metal frames). And it held the heat a lot longer than the screwdrivers, which tended to carbonize after a while.
