What do you mean? Things like those still happen, and probably will for a long time. They did end up being slightly nicer looking though, cheap 3D printers and CNC machines really increased a baseline of what hobbyist in the garage can do.

Go to website like https://hackaday.com and there will be plenty of projects like those. (Although this one is more complex than usual, so you might have to lookover a few months' worth of history to find something on that level)

I don't think the pay is really what changed all that much. Median pay for SWEs according to ZipRecruiter is $118k, which is $40k in 1987 USD (the year the person in the article started). BLS data from 1987 puts that at mid-way through the 4th income quintile, which is middle clash-ish.

Levels.fyi slants towards the higher end of pay and they say $192k, which is $65.4k in 1987 or right at the bottom of the top quintile.

Part of what changed is that software abstracted enough for hardware and software to become separate fields, so a much smaller portion of software folks are able to wire together batteries and motors and what not to go with their software.

Liquid seems like a better approach from an engineering standpoint because it is non compressible. But then I imagine dealing with liquid is more of a pain than air.

Power use would be immense and it would be insanely slow.

Nightmare fuel

Oh my god, how have I never noticed Karpathy and Car-Path-y? Amazing!

Car-(em)pathy... Now I can't unsee it!

Thanks.