Comments on: Open Source, pre-1945

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 18:47:58 +0000

So there’s an NPR radio show, Car Talk, where two brothers, who happen to be MIT-graduate mechanics with ridiculous Boston accents, answer people’s questions about their cars.

The answers are usually like, “Oh, is it making this sound — PHTBBBBBBBBBBB? And only when you turn left? Aha, your right front brake coolant confrobulator bolt is stripped, that’ll cost you about $XXXX.”

But when someone calls with a question about an old car, pre-1960 or so, the answer is more like, “What you need is a squirt bottle full of water, and you spray a few squirts into the carburetor.” Then the caller frets about the possibility of ruining the engine, and they say, “Oh no no no no, cars of that era are virtually indestructible no matter what you do to them. Try the squirt bottle thing, and if that doesn’t work, you need to haul off kick it.”

I wonder if the engineering tradeoff here is “fuel-efficient serviceable” or perhaps “clean serviceable”… I suspect and hope it is not “cheap good”.

By: John

John — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 08:49:25 +0000

You wrote an impressive story. Thanks for that.
With the best wishes from Germany

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:05:57 +0000

car deals

Excellent post. Keep it up!

By: V

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:56:40 +0000

Great story.. reminded of my grandfather and my dad.

By: Sumana Harihareswara

Sumana Harihareswara — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:54:34 +0000

I have never before seen such a perfect emotional distillation of this particular sort of pride. Thanks. Got a little teary.

By: mike

mike — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 04:25:26 +0000

Please move your footer 1 px to the left

By: links for 2007-04-10

links for 2007-04-10 — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 04:18:04 +0000

[...] Bread and Circuits » Open Source, pre-1945 (tags: interesting software resourcefulness DIY) [...]

By: Kevin

Kevin — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 21:43:54 +0000

Perfect, from a literary standpoint, a philosophical standpoint, and a technical standpoint. I once needed a jump start from someone when living outside of suburbia. The only lady who came around didn’t know what I was asking her to do. As in, had never heard of people doing what I was going to do.

She didn’t have cables (I did though), she didn’t know how to open her hood, and she was afraid I was going to kill her battery when she saw me hooking up cables to it, after I told her what I was hooking the cables up to.

I’m glad I read this.

By: Thimble

Thimble — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 20:43:11 +0000

While what you grandfather did was pretty incredible – building a tv from radio parts! – what your grandmother did was the greater story, imho.

At least he had the benefit of working with professional quality parts. She’s the one who had to figure out your grandfathers patchwork crazy homemade system and repair it. The former sounds more like open source software. The latter, more like working with hacked multi-developer legacy code…

By: JB

JB — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 20:01:13 +0000

Mozilla?! So are you responsible for the constant “Firefox has encountered a problem and must close! Sorry for the inconvenience.” ?!?!?!?!?!?! Thanks for that “update.”