> what is the mt. everest of diy?
All respect to the "cloners" here, who try to preserve or recreate the best of the past: cloning is not the pinnacle of DIY.
Think: where did those "classic" boxes come from? Under a cabbage bush? Fell from the sky? No, some person or group developed, built, refined, and promoted each one. And in many older designs, there was some one person who "DIY"ed. Sometimes alone, sometimes with a machine shop and soldering technician handling the dreary details. Recently design/development tends to look like a team effort, but there is usually some one person who is the "heart" of the project who "DIY"s it.
Most of us here "dabble" with spare change and odd time. Much much more can be done than most of us do. My father built vacuum-tube computers in college (they didn't work so well). How do you think the first Apple Computer, H-P 200, and most of the progressive 1960s recording consoles were made? In shops much like yours, if you became compulsive about your project. Mostly a few people in a garage or loft. How were the first McIntosh amps, Olsen ribbon-mikes, Neumann condenser mikes made? In shops hardly different from personal playgrounds. I have been in the building where Olsen developed his acoustics for RCA. Many years later my father worked on the early RCA transistor computers in the same building. A flip-flop was a card that looked a LOT like the Flickenger amp discussed on the former forum. In that place, the engineers were not allowed to touch a soldering iron and the union solder techs were not allowed to think, and all projects had a team, but this is still "DIY", just with more hands to help/interfere. Even the Apollo moon-rocket is arguably the "DIY" of von Braun. He didn't invent the rocket, but he organized ideas and people and funding for 50 years through changes and collapses of governments.
I love the past and love people who try to keep it alive. But "DIY" can and should and does encompass completely original work (as original as possible in a field where you have to stand on the backs of giants and piles of midgets).
> diy all tube computa, charles babbage(?) style. I don't think even charles got his working.......
No he didn't, and Babbage's Engines were intended to be steam powered. His small working models were hand-cranked. Expanding the mechanism so it could do work faster than a human looked obvious, but was at the edge of 19th century machining skills and beyond Babbage's budget. Mechanical computers working on quite different principles were made in the 1930s. The art of very fine machining at the scale needed in a Babbage Engine just didn't happen, though a museum has recently managed a working bodge after much time and expense.
