For my part, being born rather than getting into the hobby in 1965, the differences between then and now seem slightly less dramatic: my true entry into r/c model boating began in 1979, when I spent a large chunk of what I'd earned in my summer job on an O.S. Cougar 4 channel set, compelte with r/x and four servos. Of course my present day 2,4GHz set knows quite a few more tricks, and is handier in many ways, and there are indeed a number of materials, adhesives, and pieces of technical equipment available now that didn't exist then, but to me they seem more like extensions and improvements on what I remember from the first half of the 1980s than like something completely different (and now for …).

The really big difference for me is the richness and availability of and ease of access to information! Back in the day, the occasional article in the Swedish periodical Allt om Hobby ("Everything on Hobbies", which otherwise mainly wrote about trains and planes, perhaps an odd copy of Model Boats if someone had been to Copenhagen or Stockholm, were international press could be found, and cheaply printed catalogues from the larger hobby shops was what I had to be contented with; for the rest, it was mainly guess work, trial-and-error, and discussions with a similarly inclined mate of mine.

That said, I do of course agree that things have come quite a long way since the 1980s also on the materials front. At the moment, I probably get the biggest kick from the modern ESCs; when I started out, I certainly couldn't afford the rheostat type proportional speed controls, even if I had known where to buy one, and any model of mine with electric propulsion was "controlled" by a three-way switch mechanically connected to a servo that would give (full) forward, stop and (full) reverse.

/Mattias

Edited By Banjoman on 27/07/2016 15:22:20