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Comment by matthewmcg | Hacker News Reader

"In 1967 or 1968, as a senior in high school, our electronics teacher ... arranged for me to go to a company in Sunnyvale (Sylvania) to program a computer because I already knew all the electronics in class at school. Mr. McCollum did this for students with electronics abilities every year, finding local companies with engineers and projects that would let high school students come and and get some experience."

It's amazing that his high school had electronics classes and vocational externships. Is that something that was common at the time or just another amazing aspect of Silicon Valley?

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I grew up in a small-to-mid-sized town in California's central valley, east of the Bay Area and SV. We had an electronics class, and as a freshman, I took it.

If you needed parts for a homework assignment, the only store that had them was Radio Shack (yes, they actually sold lots of electronic parts back then). So one day, I meandered into The Shack to get a resistor I needed. Lo and behold, there was a new manager, a guy named Tony. This guy was much friendlier than the previous manager had been. That other manager just tried to get us in and out, apparently presuming we wanted to shoplift or something.

This new guy? Happy to show me the new TRS-80, and though my parents wouldn't pay for one, he scarcely complained as I went back to use it every day for more than a year. I taught myself how to code on that machine, and so I have that freshman electronics class to thank, in part, for my career.

That's some serious passion for programming. I try to relate to people what "passion" actually means and this is a good example of it.

Thanks! I didn't mention the following year, when I discovered that my high school's math club had built a Process Technology Sol-20 from a kit, and that the computer was available to anyone who wanted to use it (after school). I spent the next year using that, even hand-assembling machine language programs. Obviously the computer captured my imagination as a kid. Maybe as an adult, too. :-)

In the late 80s and 90s, you could still find specific electrical parts at Frys in the bay area, but that quickly faded towards the late 90s. The only place that had a continual decent stock of components was Quement Electronics in San Jose. A now, gone era.

Gratuitous photo share (not my photo) - https://www.flickr.com/photos/xythian/4223283103/

Palo Alto Fry's still has a few aisles of electrical parts and tools.

A few, but not like it used to be :) When I have some free time, I'd be interested in going back and seeing what would be involved in recreating some of the labs these days. I'm curious how many of the parts are available on amazon.

I had a similar experience only for me in the 70's/80's it was Dick Smith Electronics for parts, and then the Computer Age store with its Apple II and Atari stock .. those were definitely different times. The sales guy even gave me a floppy to save my code on - after school, I'd hurry down there to get a couple hours of free computing time. Man, what a rush.

Similar background, only got hooked on the commodore BBS scene... I'd ride my bmx bike holding a box of floppies to a friends to hack on, with the warm smell of manure rising up through the air. (Turlock)

Cool. My first programming experience was as a high school senior going to the CSU, Stanislaus (Turlock) computer lab to play on the Apple II's, and later on the C-64 in that lab. It was my job to be the "lab assistant" for about 6 months before starting school there. (put paper in the printers, make sure equipment stays in the room, show people where the "on" buttons are)

Yeah, a ride down Monte Vista Ave was a pretty "pastoral" experience.

Going from toying with analog electronics to getting to use an actual computer was pretty exciting, at least for somebody in a rural area who could not afford such toys otherwise. Putting simple graphics into the Apple was a stroke of genius and made it quite an experience to play with.

Turlock! I was in Lodi. I do remember the BBS scene fondly; I was in my 20s by that point.

California used to have amongst the highest per pupil education funding, which started changing in the 70s and is now amongst the lowest in the US. This article explains some of the history http://california-in-crisis.news21.com/node/24

The consequence was "more" available to students and teachers.

High schools in Australia have electronics classes.

When I was in grades 7-9 it was mandatory, then elective after that. We didn't flash chips back then (in the late 90's) but I bet they do now.

We mostly did hands on of making circuit boards (acid etch), and soldering all the components together for simple little circuits. I only stayed in electronics until grade 10, but I know they made some pretty cool stuff in grade 11 and 12.

Wow. We had an elective "electricity" class in high school (small K-12 school in US) and we basically went over Ohm's law and how to use a multimeter. Sounds like you had something closer to what first year EE majors get.

Funny you should say that.

I went on to Study Software Engineering with a minor in Digital Electronics.

In my 5th and final year, I took an electronics class called "Digital Electric Design" which actually turned out to be my only hands-on Electronics course at University. All the EE people were shocked to see me there, as I'd not been in all the same hands-on EE type classes as them for the prior 4 years. (I think we only had Maths in common)

They were more that a little shocked I knew how to use a soldering iron, acid etch bath, multimeter, had the resistor charts memorized etc. etc. Apparently, they'd spend the preceding 4 years learning that at Universtiy which I had learned in high school. (The Australians had learned it in High School too, but my university was majority international students)

I don't know if they kind of back slid over the years, But what you learned in high school sound similar to what I did in high school in the late 70s. I used to love playing with the radio shack electronic experimenters kit with spring terminals and color coded wires too!

> High schools in Australia have electronics classes.

They do? None of those I know (high school 2000 - 2005) in Perth did electronics. We had the usual woodworking/metalworking/art/photography electives, plus drama & music, but no electronics. We also had extremely sub-par computing classes, with no option for a T.E.E level (i.e. contributes to your University entrance score) computing class whatsoever.

I did electronics in year 10 in Perth around that time. It was a pretty neat class, we got to program a PIC as well as learn some basic circuit design stuff.

Shame. We had electronics as a VCE elective for the final year.

Wow, I didn't have this. What state?

Victoria, Northern.

its an amazing aspect of silicon valley. Back then, it was way different too. Just like steve jobs was able to call the founder of HP in highschool and ended up getting a job there for the summer.

"Just like steve jobs was able to call the founder of HP in highschool and ended up getting a job there for the summer."

There is nothing that unusual about that now except with tech companies or any other company that is the current "belle of the ball" or super large and well known.

The idea is to learn and gain experience not to get some buzz because you have achieved some popular culture dream of working for the same place that millions of others would like to. Sure we'd all like to work at those places. That's the problem.

If you pick any company that is generally off the public radar (and not being fawned over in the press with a celebrity CEO) it is quite possible to send a postal letter to the CEO and have a fair shot of getting a summer job. Or even an email but my feeling is a letter would get more attention and seem more genuine.

Not all the value lies in the usual suspects that have more applicants than they can handle.

A corollary to this goes with low paid jobs. Our offices used to be located near a Walmart. Yet not one time in 9 years to anyone ever come through the door looking for an office or admin or warehouse job. Yet everyday people showed up at the Walmart and got a much lower paying job and (from our pov) much worse working conditions. It's important to put effort in, be creative, and not do what everyone else is doing.

Yeah, but HP was the "belle of the ball" at the time.

The difference now vs then is that if you were a kid who had heard of HP and wrote a letter because you were that interested in computers, there's an extremely high chance that you would be a good employee in some capacity. Today for every single kid with natural curiosity and potential for working in a tech country there are probably more than 100 that want to work at Facebook just because everyone uses it and it sounds like a good job or career stepping stone.

I was a Junior in high school in Springfield, Oregon and we had classes like these. One was Principles of Technology were we played with wiring houses and oscilloscopes. We also had a robust machine shop with CNC machines. In Principles of tech we had a injection molder. I also took four years of drafting and auto-tech.

So we had the tools in the tenth grade to design a part in autocad in drafting class, take it over to the machine shop and have a CNC machine mill a mold that could then be pushed over to have parts injection molded.

All that is gone now due to cuts in funding.

And for fun we actually had a class to teach people how to be a logger.

Doesn't that piss you off that those types of classes are not around anymore? I'm a bit older, so our machine shop was all manual WW2 surplus lathes and mills. Our well equipped woodshop had a teacher with requisite missing digits.

It's been ~3yrs since I've graduated high school, but my high school (top in the county and an 'A' school in Florida) didn't have any electronics, shop, or computer science classes. I vaguely remember almost taking "Web Development" thinking they would go into PHP or something like that, but apparently they just made small sites on Microsoft Word and played video games the entire class. Such a shame.

So much anger. My sisters boy just turned 21. His dad is a electrician and always stressed that he should do jobs that can't be outsourced. Corey just got a union job for 30 a hour as a carpenter.

Highschools in Portugal had computing and electronic classes in the late 80's.

I started with electricity concepts and basic circuits in the 7th grade and 8th grade. Sadly had to take mechanic in the 9th as electronic classes were full.

On my last three years (10-12 grade), I switched high school to became a computer technician. We had classes about data structures, programming languages, basic compiler design concepts, DB, network and graphics programming.

It made my first CS years a walk in the park.

I can't speak to other areas but Silicon Valley was definitely like that.

In the 1980s in Palo Alto, my high school AP Computer Science teacher asked parents to come in and give guest lectures in the last few weeks of class. Donald Knuth's daughter was in my class so he came and talked about TeX. Another kid's parent was a VP at a bank; he talked about secure transaction processing for ATMs. My dad (a researcher in robotics and AI) talked about expert systems.

It was okay. :-)

I went to a suburban high school in southeast Michigan. My high school had three tracks: College Prep, Business, and Vocational. Electronics was one of the Vocational subjects. They also taught "programming" to the Business students, though I have no idea at what level. I assume that these programs had been in place for many years before my time. I was in the College Prep track, so those other courses were pretty much off limits for me.

Nonetheless I got permission to sign up for Electronics. I discovered that the course was mainly going to revolve around TV repair, and the teacher even told me that I'd be bored. So I dropped it and learned that one of the math teachers had started a course in BASIC! It's not an understatement that the course changed my life.

I took votech electronics in HS; 4 hrs/day for junior and senior years. It was the opposite experience though. 1st year was analog, second was digital. Learned small signal response, Karnaugh mapping, 6502 assembly. I'm an EE now of course.

One of my high school friends finds my Arduino obsession ridiculous because he learned all about soldering and electronics st the high school he attended before transferring to mine. Our poor school district could barely afford welding, small gas engines, and basic Windows and Office (document/spreadsheet/presentation program basic use) classes.

Understanding how these work is one thing, and that used to be enough to be worth employing. Today, you have to have a passion for using that knowledge to solve problems.

In the Toronto,Canada area we had electrical classes where we learned the basics of electricity but more with a focus on wiring a house and also after taking that you could choose an electronics class in the more senior levels. This was mid to late 90s. I'm not sure if they are still in the curriculum.

That's sort of vestigial when you compare it to the old Industrial Arts track in Ontario high schools. As I recall, Grade 9 Electricity was a common course required for both the Electricity (what you'd need to know as an apprentice electrician) and Electronics (prep for a technician/technologist program at a College of Applied Arts and Technology) courses in grades 10-12, and both programs required additional courses in drafting and the basics in sheet metal, wordworking and machine shops as well (things you'd need to practically apply what you were taking in your core courses). Unfortunately, the way things were arranged meant that opting for the IA track in Grade 9 pretty much meant giving up university as an option since you'd have to give up the credits in things like history, geography and CanLit that were required at the grade 9 and 10 level for an OSSHGD (Grade 13 diploma). And there was a big gender divide as well, at least at the time. It's a damned shame that the only approach considered for fixing the system was to (mostly) dump it.

I graduated from high school in Toronto in 2009 and we had elective electronics courses in Grades 11 and 12. I remember learning about logic gates, flip-flops, and building simple circuits on breadboards. We even ended up connecting them to the parallel port on a computer and writing simple programs to communicate with them.

It's not unheard-of. My high school (in Waterloo, Ontario) had an internship program like this too, and it's how I got my first programming job in about 2000-2001, at age 15. There were about ten students in my class that got technology jobs of one sort or another that year.

Note - I'm not in SV.

Until I graduated from college it was hard to get anyone to take me seriously or even respond. I think the barriers to enter the tech job market with no experience or degree is so much higher today.

My Chicago-suburban public high school offered Electronics Tech 1, 2, and Independent Study (basically a hacker space pretending to be a class). This was in the early 1990s.

Evanston Township? I took electronics there at around the same time.

District 211 (Northwest Suburbs). Great fun! Back then I had no idea how spoiled I was. All the power supplies, oscilloscopes, multimeters, soldering stations, and parts I could ever want.

I was in middle-school during this time in Southern California and had hands-on electronics classes.

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