Newsgroups: comp.robotics
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!minsky
From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: Why did Heath expire?
Message-ID: <1994Dec14.064832.14304@news.media.mit.edu>
Sender: news@news.media.mit.edu (USENET News System)
Cc: minsky
Organization: MIT Media Laboratory
References: <marcelsD0pzv1.CJr@netcom.com> <3ckfpp$rut@tabloid.amoco.com>
Date: Wed, 14 Dec 1994 06:48:32 GMT
Lines: 69

In article <3ckfpp$rut@tabloid.amoco.com> jocoats@amoco.com writes:
>In article CJr@netcom.com, marcels@netcom.com (Marcel Schoppers) writes:
>>>Does anyone know why Heath, maker of Hero robots, went out of business?
>>>Seems to me they had the only arm capable of lifting more than a few ounces
>>>for less than $25K.
>>>Marcel
>>>
>
>From what I understand, Heath (who originated with the Heath Parasol Airplane
>I think) did a market study.  It seems that their customer base was getting
>one year older for each calendar year.  This indicated that they had a very
>loyal set of customers, but there were very few new kit builders comming into
>their market.  Rather than keep investing in an efectively decreasing market,
>they decided to close doors on the kit arena.  

It is certainly a serious problem.  We're now faced with graduate
students in robotics wasting time learning to build hardware.  (I say
wasting, not because building is a bad thing, but because they don;t
often get good enough at it to approach professional or state-of-art
technique.)  Perhaps I'm exaggerating but it seems to me that in the
"old days" most of the students arrived with pre-college experience at
assembling Heathkits, etc.  My first oscilloscope was a kit supplied
by a company called "Precise Electronics," which it wasn't.  Several
other companies had Hi-Fi kits, too.

I could write a long essay on the disappearance also of the
construction sets: Erector, Meccano, Tinkertoy (yes, I think this was
actually the best one for younger children), and so on.  They were
replaced mainly by Lego, which I regard as more-or-less two
dimensional--in the sense that kids who use it don't learn much about
space angles.

The observation about "aging" made by jocoats@amoco.com has a serious
implication: the new generation will be raised by parents who have
never build any electronics, nor have made and flown anything like
model airplanes, nor, let's face it, dissected anything that "contains
no user serviceable parts."  Once we turn this memetic corner, it will
be hard ever to turn back again, because the parents won;t be able to
encourage, let alone help, the kids.  

I don't have any evidence for that, but here's a close analogy: I
heard a talk about functional illiteracy in inner city cultures: the
point was that there is a fairly obscure culture around the art of
reading books--and once you have parents who don't read to children,
it becomes hard for the kids, when they go to school, to acquire that
skill. The skill is obscure in the sense of having a huge, never discussed
body of default assumptions.  If the book begins, as many do, with
open contexts like "Mary's dog was barking at the door," we almost
congenital story-understanders would never think to ask (or even
wonder) "what was Mary's last name," or "are they talking about the
girl Mary in the apartment across the street?"  Instead we know,
because it is a "book-story", that these are imaginary story-people in
virtual worlds whose locations and architecture are inessential and
not to be wondered about, etc.

I think building stuff in early life might also be important because
it teaches critical thinking!  You have a conjecture that
such-and-such a method will make your structure strong enough--and you
find out that it doesn't work, perhaps because that strong-looking
square so easily buckled into a parallelogram, etc.  No fancy
political-style argument will make it work, either; mefchanical
structures are immune to clever excuses, apologies, and cover-ups: you
have to face the problem, understand it, and fix it.

Well, what a loss. If you have young kids, get them lots of wooden
blocks, and big TinkerToy sets, if you can find them.

