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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

When I was a boy I'd stop by the local TV repair shop and they'd give me old TVs. I had a lot of fun with them, like randomly swapping the tubes around and seeing what would happen. My mom was sure I was going to electrocute myself.

You're lucky your dad could mentor you with that stuff. I didn't know anybody who knew anything about electronics, so I just floundered around with it. That all changed when I got to college, where there was electronics expertise everywhere and I was finally able to build things that worked.

For example, someone finally showed me how to solder properly. What a difference a couple minutes of help makes!

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Strangely enough I got almost no mentoring, he was like, the stuff is all there if you want to use it, I got taken to the uni labs on weekends and the family went to the library once a week religiously.

He was both a lecturer of maths and computing, but also taught teachers how to teach. His attitude was that if you were really interested you needed to do it yourself and learn through successes and failures and build up all the concepts in your own mind - it was the concepts, not the facts that made all the difference going forwards.

Now this is so much more true than ever, because facts and calculations are available as a "service" effectively on the internet.

Abstracting the concepts and synthesizing new ones through extension, application of lightly related techniques/ materials/methods, cross pollination, etc in your mind is the truly irreplaceable skill that leads to disruption and innovation.

I did better with cars, for the simple reason that when I took them apart, I could see how everything worked. With electronics, you need an oscilloscope to see the magic. All I had was a VOM.

Ironically, there were lots of kids taking cars apart in high school, so I could help and get help. But in college, nobody, and I mean nobody, was interested in cars. It's still hard to find anyone who is, hardly anyone has a modified car. My (medium modified) dodge wouldn't merit a glance in my high school daze, but today people go ape when I drive by in it.

>With electronics, you need an oscilloscope to see the magic. All I had was a VOM.

The price of test equipment is one of the reasons I went into software despite having an EEng degree. Tinkering with a computer is way cheaper, and I sort of gravitated towards stuff that had software in it, then ended up realizing that I don't really care about electronics all that much. The degree served well for getting a job in writing firmware, I guess.

Where I live, on one day in the year, people could put their bulky junk in front of their houses for it to be collected[1]. Lots and lots of radios and TVs. For my friends and me it was the yearly electronics component delivery;-). At that time the devices often had a pouch inside that contained the schematics. I learned a ton from that.

I also enjoyed the stories from Feynman how he tinkered around with radios bought at rummage sales. I think they are in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" but there is also a recording where he recounts those times in person[2].

[1] https://germany-for-foreigners.blogspot.com/2012/02/sperrmul...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmEoL5C7ths

>You're lucky your dad could mentor you with that stuff.

Looking back on my childhood vs today.

I was underutilized. My parents didnt know past geometry.

At the same time, very thankful my dad got me a computer as a kid. Wish we did more than install video games. But hey, computers broke more back then and I learned how to fix OS or hardware problems.

My 8th grade science teacher taught us how to solder. And how to count in binary using our fingers. He was pretty awesome in a lot of ways.

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