People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
My father raised me to build computers, hardware. Literally, as an 8 year old, I had a soldering iron and circuit boards, and this was in neighbourhoods that wouldn't have a whole lot of money or anything. And I figured out ways to just hustle.
The only thing that was in my mind when we made that first phone call was, 'Is it going to work?' We had all these parts hand soldered together, engineers standing by with the soldering iron - just in case.
Victor Papenack, who was teaching design, had his students making radios for a penny each that could be shipped to Third World people.
Electronics are getting more and more accessible now - you don't have to be an engineer to start building things.
Back in the '40s and early '50s, building simple electronic projects was a popular hobby of many people. Back then, you could buy, you know, a few parts and - with tubes and build something on your kitchen table, and it would actually work.
In the 1920s and 30s, when Radio Shack was young, a much earlier generation of nerds swarmed into these tiny shops to talk excitedly about building radios and other transmission devices. You might say that Radio Shack helped define gadget culture for four generations, from radio whizzes up to smartphone dorks.
Back in the 1980s, you could learn how to add memory cards to your PC in a Radio Shack.
I used my mother's radio as a PA system. I'd take the telephone, the speaking part, and take those two leads off and lead them into the radio and the sound would come out of the speaker.
What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself.
I've been a bit of an electronics enthusiast and maker for a long time. I actually started the forum called ModRetro. It's an electronics enthusiast community that focuses on modifying vintage game consoles, and it's actually one of the larger game console modification forums on the Internet.
Unlike other children, I did not get a branded video game. Mine was an open circuit that even buzzed.
I spent my childhood tinkering with electronic circuits, on breadboards, as they used to be called, in particular making radio transmitters.
I grew up in East Germany, and we were short on technology. So my father was really proud to be the owner of a turntable.
I decided to design and build my own stereo amplifier system at age 13.
In the early 1970s, phone phreaks manipulated the long-distance system using blue boxes that they built from sketchy photocopied schematics that were often riddled with errors. Not many had the skill to do this. Phreaking was restricted to a select few.
I actually built a tiny computer as a junior high school project.
I built computers and stuff when I was a teenager and whatever.
When I graduated high school, nearly a half-million people subscribed to 'Popular Electronics' magazine. Soldering up some radio or hi-fi amplifier on the basement workbench was not just a personal passion - a lot of young people were doing the same. The magazine expired in 1999 for lack of interest.
I had been building electronic musical instruments since I was a kid.
You hear these stories about people who take apart their radio and put it back. Or just learn a lot from taking it apart. But I wasn't as into that stuff as I was just into how computer programs work.
Forrest Mims is the author of the famous book 'Getting Started in Electronics,' published by RadioShack for many years. I bought the book in the 1980s and had a blast making the projects in it. When I was editor-in-chief of 'MAKE,' I asked Forrest to write a column for the magazine, called 'The Backyard Scientist.'
