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Comment by ziaddotcom | Hacker News Reader

Vinyl sales surpassed CDs in 2020. I suspect many of those sales were albums released in 2020 by artists born after 2000. Very little nostalgia would be motivating those purchases.

If inventing the future, one must be able to discern what is a classic or canonical element of the past that is presently underutilized. One could make the argument that Elon Musk is nostalgia obsessed with what has been resuscitated from NASA technology that had been mothballed.

Perhaps Descartes was absurdly nostalgic for the times of Euclid, and Einstein absurdly nostalgic for the times of Descartes. Will we lapse into the dark ages if all the Amiga 500s stop working, probably not.

If we lost the knowledge of how to tech how the ARM architecture works, as was the case prior to the raspberry pi but after the death of the Acorn line of RISC PCs, we would have lost quite a bit of important knowledge.

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I think there is a type of nostalgia that doesn’t require having lived it before. I enjoy the feeling of going to 50s themed restaurants, despite not having lived in the 50s and not even raised in the US. Just movies influencing my taste.

I like hamburgers and wasn't raised in Germany but I wouldn't go around Berlin saying I have a certain kind of nostalgia for the 1940s despite not having lived it.

> If we lost the knowledge of how to tech how the ARM architecture works, as was the case prior to the raspberry pi but after the death of the Acorn line of RISC PCs, we would have lost quite a bit of important knowledge.

In which universe did that ever happen? ARM was alive and kicking to the point that even Intel had its own ARM designs. Heck, I worked with ARM-powered devices 20 years ago and those were far from being "lost knowledge".

Just because something isn't being hyped to edge of the solar system at a given point in time, doesn't mean it's dead or forgotten...

The Acorn Archimedes came out in 1987. Is 20ish years vs 30ish years a relevant distinction when the far newer raspberry pi serves to reify the educational goals and funding that the Archimedes was underwritten to do. Unless you are saying the pipeline for educating tomorrows computer engineers should start with M1 macs instead of raspberry pi, it seems we are in violent agreement. There is a typo where I wrote "to tech" instead of "to teach," perhaps that added confusion.

Raspberry Pi had a great image and great marketing. But it wasn't the only hobby device available at the time, and ARM was massively used in industry. I think talking about loss of knowledge there is a little weird.

(I also found a lot of the rhetoric around the RasPi at its launch quite weird, and very dismissive of all the other work that had taken place before it)

Any examples of any of those hobbiest devices at the time that had scale of educational impact that raspberry pi has had at $5-$35 a pop? Arduino is not a single board computer. It largely needs something like a pi or better just to program it.

I won't dispute they brought the prices down, but there were sub-$100 devices around, some (like the sheevaplug) included the case, power supplies and onboard storage, though no video output.

The pi was part of a continuum, rather than a revolution in its own right.

> Vinyl sales surpassed CDs in 2020.

cassette tape sales apparently doubled in 2020:

https://www.nme.com/news/music/cassette-sales-have-more-than...

Leaving aside used sales (which can make sense for CDs from a pure economic perspective).

I assume most people who buy CDs are those who want to own their music but don't want to deal with torrents and figure that, if they're going to buy a whole album, they might as well buy the CD and rip it.

Whereas vinyl and, I guess???, cassettes appeal to nostalgia and a certain physicalness of the media. CDs probably seem rather utilitarian in contrast.

> Elon Musk is nostalgia obsessed with what has been resuscitated from NASA technology

being nostalgic about the tech vs the vision is different.

Exactly, and I think if SpaceX were to review designs of the Saturn 5 it should be obviously not because they are nostalgic, but because they're trying to make the best rocket for the future they can.

Plus vinyl was "obsoleted" by later tech, which is different from being mothballed but otherwise un-surpassed.

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