Publishing Schematics Before “Open Source” Was a Word

Publishing Schematics Before “Open Source” Was a Word(fabscene.medium.com)

39 points by extralongdivisi 3 days ago | 11 comments

femto 22 minutes ago |

Most electrical/electronic items (radios, TVs, washing machines, ...) used to come with a schematic, or at least a block diagram, inside the device. Similarly, published integrated circuit data sheets contained enough information to understand how the chip worked to a low-level. This changed around the 80s from memory? There wasn't a word for "open source" in electronics, as it was just the unnamed default. It was all paper based, as it predated wide-spread online distribution.

firasd 47 minutes ago |

I've been thinking a good way to understand the 'sociology' of information sharing is the structure of capital or prestige in an ecosystem

For example, it's not an accident that software development is a very 'open' industry. You can learn anything about making a NextJS shopping cart online. Because nobody is really getting value by holding this knowledge as secret 'alpha'

On the flipside for example, academics, scientists and journalists often have very different incentives. Getting the credit for being the first to talk about an issue is what matters for their career so they are likely to be guarded about what they're working on or what their methods are

And this is why Zuck open sources LLMs; he is not really selling tokens in some infra service so keeping the output generation scarce doesn't really matter to Meta

(Joel Spolsky had an adjacent idea saying "Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements" like Billboard publishes a lot of music journalism for free but monetizes their chats/data)

Anyway, so this explains what's going on with this electronics retailer--while it is still a perspective and effort that is uncommon--publishing the schematic is not competitive with the shop unless you start manufacturing and open up another shop

analog31 1 hour ago |

Published schematics go back to the earliest days of radio. Electronics magazines and the Radio Amateur's Handbook are roughly a century old.

Before that, there was science. Although the rules were loosely defined, scientists were expected to provide enough detail in their papers for someone else to replicate their work. That's where I learned about open design, before I learned to program.

Into the modern age, when "code" became part of electronics projects, the magazines printed source code listings, and later required authors to provide their code for an online repository. I published a couple of those articles back in the day.

MomsAVoxell 2 hours ago |

Apropos open electronics, one of my most treasured toys is a Denshi Blocks electronics experiments kit, with a synthesizer chip in it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denshi_block

There are professional versions of the Denshi block, used in engineering schools in Japan in the 80's/90's (as I recall), to lay out circuits and serve as a test-bed for student lab work:

https://www.denshiblock.co.jp/whatdbk.html

In my case, it's just a great reminder of the 70's, and how bright and shiny the future used to seem. Its also a pretty fun little woo-hoo-bonky-boing synth toy, now and then ..

I would have to wonder if there aren't pro blocks in that store somewhere, probably in their own neatly labeled section ..

bitwize 1 hour ago | |

Reminds me of a vaguely similar toy you used to be able to get at Radio Shack: the "electronics project kits". Typically, a given set of circuit components would be laid out on a board (typically thick cardboard) in a frame (wood). Attached to the leads of the components are small metal springs. You used the provided wires to connect components together by bending the springs back, inserting the stripped ends of the wires between the coils of the spring, and letting the spring snap back into place. Instructions provided with the kit showed you how to connect the components to yield all sorts of interesting things, from simple circuits that could make lights blink to working radio receivers, musical instruments, etc. Some of the more sophisticated and expensive ones had ICs, and I think a few of the later ones had microcontrollers.

OkayPhysicist 31 minutes ago | | |

I got a couple of these as a kid, handed down from my parents. Quite a bit of fun to play around with. I do remember getting a snap-together circuit which was new, but it just didn't have all the cool bits and the fun little springs of the hand-me-downs.

elevation 2 hours ago |

20 years ago my town had a boutique electronics store, somewhat like a Radio Shack, except they'd developed corporate sales as a revenue stream instead of pushing cellphone contracts on consumers. It carried on until the owner died last year.

I enjoy seeing boutique businesses but it's nice to see one where the core operation (not just the IP) has a shot at outlasting the founder.

aetherspawn 2 hours ago |

> 100% profit margin [..]

That’s not how these things work

PunchyHamster 1 hour ago | |

that means $5 part is sold for $10. It's exactly how that kind of thing works

BenjiWiebe 1 hour ago | | |

That's actually a 50% profit margin. Also known as a 50% markup, even though you marked the price up by 100%.

PunchyHamster 1 hour ago |

but there was not a single schematic in article, just pcb view without even traces