Welcome to the Ye Ol' π Shack

Written by SysOp on 2019-05-08 17:00:00 updated 2019-07-17 22:03:00

Ye Ol' Pi Shack is Coming!

To keep an eye on progress or to read of my journey in bringing this site to life: check out my blog

This is going to be a website for all those techno-geeks who like to tinker with and build electronics or write software. A social networking place to share ideas and inspire others of like mind. If you don't find pleasure in banging out your own software, using computing hardware that's not main stream or that you made yourself, scratching an itch by scrounging components and soldering them together, than continue on over to facebook. Otherwise I hope you'll be back when the doors open!

IMO computing was a lot more fun back between the 1970s and the mid 1980s than it is now. There was more creativity to it. You expected to write your own software, cobble together and add on your own bits of hardware. And people's new and inventive uses for their computers were published in magazines. Today magazines have become mostly outlets for advertising (yes, that includes reviews). Long gone are the likes of "Byte Magazine", "Creative Computing", "80 Micro"... well unless you count "Nuts & Volts", which I do!

On the other hand transistors have become cheaper than ever! Open Source hardware and software abound! The opportunity for being a hobbyist electronics and/or computing pioneer are more available than ever! Where once RAM used to cost $1,000 per 1K (1,024 bytes) and hardware programmers cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, you can now buy microcontrollers, SOCs, SBCs, ... for less than $10 and appropriate programming hardware for that same price range. Plus there's a substantial amount of development software that is available for FREE!

So it seems its time to try and reinvigorate the fun and pioneering spirit of yesteryear and hopefully have it flourish here. Although I mention mostly computing related things, microcomputing has touched virtually every form of electronic and electro-mechanical device out there. So if solder and discreet electronic components are your preferred programming language I hope you will find friends and a home here.

Its going to be a while before I flesh out my ideas and get some software written. But if this sounds like it could be fun or useful to you please drop me a line: SysOp@YeOlPiShack.net. It will encourage me to move on and I may want some alpha & beta testers. When things are ready enough to start accepting account registrations I will email those who have contacted me.

If your looking to advertise appropriate hardware or software gear please drop me a line at the above email address, mentioning you saw this page. We tech users can't use "it" if we don't know "it" is available! I won't be using external ad services since the targeting is very poor and malware is routinely published through them. I will only allow ads that are relevant to our user base. This will provide a precisely targeted marketing opportunity.