The hobbyist has not disappeared entirely. But the ranks have thinned considerably. I suspect that today there are probably less than a quarter of the hobbyists there used to be. My best guess is that the hobby era peaked sometime in the 1980s. Most of the magazines died out by the early 1990s—the same time most of the kit companies started to fade away. The demise of those businesses directly affected the number of current and future hobbyists and engineers.
And how do you solder a ball grid array IC?
Another factor was the emergence of massive cheap off-shore manufacturing. This meant you could buy ready-built products cheaper than you could buy the parts and build one yourself. A good example is a power supply. Even a complex switch mode supply for a PC cost less than $30 bucks. Why bother with building your own? Lots of products turned out like this, especially computer-related boards and modules. No wonder the kit companies went away.
One other problem is test equipment. At one time you could test what you built with a volt-ohmmeter and maybe a cheap 5 MHz single channel scope. Signal generators, power/SWR meters and counters were pretty inexpensive and you could even build your own. But today, you need a scope with a bandwidth of up to 1 GHz, a logic analyzer, and maybe even an AWG. With typical prices over $10k each, what hobbyist could afford them?
Кто чего думает? Я случайно наткнулся, удивился тому что оно все очень перекликается с СНГовыми тенденциями.
