Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Oh wow, I'm sad.

I came to the valley (no, the other one, up north) back around 1995. And Weird Stuff was absolutely one of the things that made it "Silicon" valley.

Back when I would BBS from Kansas and pore over text files listing BBS's I was green with envy at all the boards in Sunnyvale, Mountain View....

Coming out here was everything I had imagined when I walked into Fry's, Weird Stuff, Disk Drive Depot, The Computer Literacy Bookstore, Haltek Electronics....

Slowly though the hardware Mecca that was the valley gave way to the internet titans and software as Yahoo, Google, etc. appeared.

Fry's started selling T.V.s mainly.

The Saturday morning electronics surplus crawl that used to include a half-dozen stops became just HSC....

Weird Stuff moved out near the Sunnyvale dump.

The pizza dive on Steven's Creek that Woz loved became Pizza and Noodles, then just Falafels.

Vivi's is gone.

When the Donut Wheel closes shop it will be time for me to move on.

The bay area is a place of transformation - grassland became orchards, became early silicon valley, became the micro-computer revolution - and so on - one of the few constants in California is change.

> one of the few constants in California is change

Unless it is property taxes.

And let's not forget property prices.

Always an arm and a leg?

Always more than you can afford. ;-P

Direct correlation.

Property prices were affordable a 10-15 years ago. Otherwise how would we have all these middle-class families living here?

The housing bubble through the bubble bursting isn’t exactly the best example of affordability.

I agree, but my point was that there was significant period of time when folks could and did buy houses here.

Now if the parent poster had said housing stock has remained (generally) constant, I'd be in agreement on that.

I'm not so sure about this one. I remember visiting the Bay in 2003 and housing prices took my breath away. Now, of course, it's stupefying.

I think salaries have increased dramatically since that time frame, creating the perception of relative affordability for previous years. I think the % of home price increase has been fairly constant (except for the market crash).

Who knows what may happen in 10 more years! Home prices may still yet double, but then entry level SE positions may be going for 400-500k!

Everything is relative. One of the reasons I turned down a couple of job offers in Silicon Valley in the 1990s was because the cost of living was relatively high compared to the Northeast.

I thought everyone is upset because property prices were changing...

Right - with Prop 13, property taxes never change, sadly.

Direct democracy was a bad idea.

For whom? A representative democracy could raise (or low) taxes 20x as easily. A non-democratic state, even more easily.

For basically everyone? Direct democracy pretends that you just have this whole bunch of unrelated decisions, and so it lets you vote "Yes, everybody should get $10" and "No, nobody should pay for that extra $10" and then be _outraged_ that the result is economically incoherent even though that's _your_ incoherent policy at work.

It's a footgun. Methods of government vary in how many wise people you need for good decisions. For example an autocracy can work well with just one wise person, so long as they're the autocrat. Under Direct Democracy, more than half of all people need to _agree_ on a decision so you're going to need fully half your people to be wise or the outcomes will be awful. Good luck with that.

>It's a footgun. Methods of government vary in how many wise people you need for good decisions. For example an autocracy can work well with just one wise person, so long as they're the autocrat

I guess you can see how this is more of a foot canon...

> Direct democracy pretends that you just have this whole bunch of unrelated decisions, and so it lets you vote "Yes, everybody should get $10" and "No, nobody should pay for that extra $10" and then be _outraged_ that the result is economically incoherent even though that's _your_ incoherent policy at work.

Representative democracy does that too, as is evident from watching. Congress.

And non-democratic systems tend to end up with the ruling class deciding “We should get $x, And everybody else should be taxed to pay for it”, which while more fiscally coherent, isn't actually better from the perspective of anyone outside the ruling class.

> For example an autocracy can work well with just one wise person, so long as they're the autocrat.

And as long as they are not only wise, but unusually deficient in drive to serve their own self-interest. Unfortunately, it turns out that it's fairly hard to find people with the latter quality a d assure they become the autocrat; democracies, rather than relying on electors avoiding serving their self interest, rely on them actively striving to, which turns out is much more common.

And death! Meme barf buddies!

The Orchard shopping center at Bollinger and Blaney is, unsurprisingly, located on former orchard land. I played there as a kid. I remember when the first surveyor stakes went in.

I used to see a guy harvesting wheat next to Intel's fab, or walk through the bean fields where Google HQ (before Google, SGI's and Alza's respective HQs). Oh yeah, and I remember when all the houses in Palo Alto were underwater (prices had fallen so low the houses were worth less thant their mortgages).

Times change.

I remember the first time I went into Fry's. You could get chips and chips (CPU and potato).

There's a semiconductor manufacturer called Potato actually...

http://www.potatosemi.com/

They have some rather interesting parts, too.

It's not an elaborate joke either, in case anyone is wondering:

https://hackaday.com/2017/04/30/afroman-makes-a-uhf-oscillat...

Fry's was originally a grocery chain. The first Fry's Electronics was in the former Sunnyvale Fry's grocery building.

It still is actually. And the grocery logo is quite similar to the electronics logo so the unwary might end up at the "wrong" sort of Fry's for what they want.

Fry's is selling mattresses and perfume these days. Its a bit sad.

For actual electronics it's pretty much Shenzhen or gtfo these days.

Why can these amazing things exist in Shenzhen but not here?

Toxic waste

Electronics (physical things) require prototyping shops, which require physical space. Unfortunately land is at a premium in the Bay Area.

As rents rise beyond oppressive rates, I worry the Bay Area won't be as innovative anymore because startups (software and hardware) won't be able to afford taking risks.

Oh, for sure. They're absolutely going to keep squeezing more and more rent out until they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. It's politically inevitable.

>Electronics (physical things) require prototyping shops, which require physical space.

This is true. Look at any of the 70's and 80's computer magazines on archive.org, and you'll see only about 20% of the ads are from companies in SV. All the others are scattered in cities big and small from coast to coast.

It's amazing to think that small towns in Illinois and rural Virginia used to have big players in the hardware industry.

Now, with the exception of the increasingly rare spark from Apple, it's not about building innovative and interesting physical things anymore. It's about taking other people's money and shuffling it around trying to make more of it through half-baked startup ideas. Silicon Valley is just banking in slow motion.

My favorite story of computer companies was Coleco, which was a former leather company turned into a pool manufacturer to a video game and computer company. HQ in Connecticut and Amsterdam, NY of all places.

It was a cool computer too — to this day their super action controllers are my favorite game controller.

Yeah, I remember the ColecoVision and the Adam (which could wipe your tapes if powered on/off with the tapes in the drive iirc).

Unfortunately, many of my computers came from that OTHER leather turned electronics company -- Tandy.

> innovative

What was the last thing Apple made that wasn't just a marginally polished version of someone else's invention?

This might be a bit hyperbolic, but I agree with the general thrust. Their watch was a pretty clear response to Pebble. The iPhone was an impressive achievement, but smartphones had been available for 6 years when it was released. The iPod was certainly the best MP3 player, but it was far from the first.

That's not really a knock on Apple; they've been very successful jumping in to proven markets with incredibly polished versions of existing products. But I agree it's been a long while since they've done anything as innovative as their early days. They got a nice injection of innovation when they brought back Jobs's other company, NeXT, including the foundation of all their current operating systems. But even that stuff is almost 30 years old.

Innovation doesn’t have to happen at the product level; it can also apply to manufacturing. For example, Dell innovated the supply chain of desktop computers.

For Apple, there’s lots of innovation in the way they create hardware at scale with previously unheard of tolerances. For example, when they thought “let’s make a laptop chassis from milled aliminium” they couldn’t just send the design out to a company used to making millions of milled aluminum bodies of that size.

Apple also innovated by bringing 64-bit CPUs to mobile phones (not a surprising innovation, but they managed to do it earlier than many people suspected were possible)

> smartphones had been available for 6 years when it was released.

I had a Sony Ericsson P-800 when the iPhone was launched. It was the first smartphone that didn't look like something out of Star Trek (and I mean it in a bad way). When you compare an iPhone with my P-800, it looks like the iPhone is something that actually came from the future.

Sure. I had a Palm Treo. The iPhone was definitely a better product, a highly evolved one from a consumer perspective. But it's not like Apple invented the smartphone or the MP3 player. They did improve them drastically from the user perspective, and they are amazing marketers. I give them full credit for that, but rxhernandez has a point.

> it's not like Apple invented the smartphone or the MP3 player

It's not. It's more like they invented the first usable smartphone and the MP3 player everyone would want to have.

There is a parallel with the Apple II here - it was one of the very first personal computers that was approachable, self-contained (with a real keyboard built-in), booted from a ROM with an easy to use programming language, could display color, output sound, and had expansion slots that were usually hidden under a beige cover. Apple didn't invent the personal computer - they only made one of the first ones people would actually want to use.

Remember Apple was acquired by NeXT. NeXT made the first Unix workstations non-technical users could actually use.

Their use of solid-state storage on the MacBook Air family enabled ultra-thin laptops others copied later on. Backlit keyboards (debuted in the Titanium Powerbooks). It seems everyone else just makes marginally cheaper versions of things Apple did first.

>What was the last thing Apple made that wasn't just a marginally polished version of someone else's invention?

Search the patent database.

Why are you wherever you live and not Shenzhen?

Family, friends, culture, lack of means to communicate?

Just because some yearn for something in a area does not mean they want to live in the area.

Personally I yearn for programming meetups, but everytime I look in my area all is PHP/webdev based; or a hour drive to a major city.

All because I want to live close to my family, friends and speak my mother tongue.

So, what, any national can just pick up and move to Shenzhen?

I gave my comment merely to provoke some thought about why people and industries may live where they live, and not near to each other.

The tea maker culture, tinkering with electronics, working on meaningful challenges - hardware, medical, non-apps has mostly left Silicon Valley compared to how it was.

Instead two of the most dominant companies fund themselves with ad revenue or selling private information.

Apple does hardware, but it’s a closed box.

The factories are almost next-door.

Outsourcing basically. All hail the almighty growth curve...

Akihabara still has some nice shops.

Zhongguancun in Beijing used to have a lot of emalls, but they’ve been retreating over time as all this stuff moves online.

>Akihabara still has some nice shops.

Akihabara jumped the shark almost ten years ago. Now it's mostly a legend fueled by internet wanna-be otaku who have never been to, and never will go to Japan.

I remember exploring the impossibly narrow vertical electronics stores of Akihabara in the late 80's and early 90's and you never knew what you might find.

I still stop by a couple of times a year, but these days it's just a place to find iPhone accessories and old parts for restoring vintage PC clones.

When the iPhone became the #1 phone in Japan, it was over. Just about the only interesting thing about Aki these days is the maid cafes. Everything else is tourist cosplay junk.

They still have many narrow vertical electronics stores in Akihabara. You really still don't know what you might find. It is a real treat. I have been there three times in the past five years and each time has been roughly the same. There are at least a dozen store fronts for each class of component you can think of and they are nestled in these walkways underneath buildings, in alleys, or on street fronts.

There's still Super Potato at least.. but mostly I agree

The last time I went I was just thinking how my inaka HARD OFF was every bit as interesting as the Akiba shops these days...

You can still find some interesting shops. Ham radio, specialty lightbulbs, robot component shops, for a few examples.

The maid cafes aren't that interesting. Agree with everything else. Most of the shops now are manned by Immigrants from Nepal.

Akiba is still the place to go for all those parts, there are just fewer stores and you have to know where to look. I worked at a startup that constantly needed parts for the hardware component and the engineer would go to Akiba, and only Akiba, atleast a few times a month for components for a device that was connected to a vending machine.

You're not going to get a deal on common consumer electronics like a camera or video games, but even still its pretty rare that there is a place where you can go and see nearly any consumer electronic you could possibly want in person.

-> only interesting thing about Aki these days is the maid cafes. Everything else is tourist cosplay junk.

Sorry but that is not a good summary. Only a small part of akihabara is built for tourist. And how is maid cafe the only interesting thing?

reaperducer must really like being called "Goshujin-sama".

Golden Computer Arcade in Hong Kong is really worth visiting too.

http://www.12hk.com/area/ShamShuiPo/GoldenShoppingArcade.sht...

Al's Electronics in Berkeley is still on.

  Haltek Electronics

Haltek, or Halted (HSC)?

I think Donut Wheel may be located on unincorporated land, because it was one of the last places where smoking was legal indoors. It was packed with smokers all the time.

Lou's (San Jose) is long gone, and Stan's was ruined by the people who took it over a few years ago, so Donut Wheel is the only decent donut place around anymore.

I was sad. Now I'm despondent. At least Stan's Donuts is still open.

In name only.

> Vivi's is gone.

Yeah, it was kind of disappointing that they replaced it with a Starbucks of all things…

> Oh wow, I'm sad.

This is not a sadness per se, it's the by-the-book nostalgia.

    Nostalgia is a sentimentality for the past, 
    typically for a period or place with happy 
    personal associations.

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