Hi all,

I'm putting together a presentation to welcome i3Detroit's new members and explain some deeper background of the larger phenomenon that they're now part of -- I've come to understand that quite a few folks don't realize the *kerspace thing goes back decades at this point. And as I put together the story, I have a few gaps myself:

1: All the early material I can find (HOPE 2004 Building Hackerspaces talk, for instance, or Spacerogue's book) talks about hackerspaces as places with computers and maybe soldering equipment. When and where did the expansion to more tools take place? What spaces were some of the earliest to add oscilloscopes, for instance? How about non-electronics-related tools like woodworking or welding? (I'm not trying to establish "the first" of anything, but understand when the shift took hold.)

2: In the recent Hackaday podcast https://hackaday.com/2023/08/25/hackaday-podcast-233-chandrayaan-on-the-moon-cyberdecks-hackerspaces-born-at-a-german-computer-camp/ around the 39m30s mark, Jens mentions a move by then-East-Germany to allocate a fraction of state-owned buildings to culture, before turning everything loose in a market economy, as the reason C-base exists how and where it does. Where can I learn more about this legislation/allocation? How did the timing work? That would've been a 1989/1990 thing, but C-base gives its founding date as 1995.

If there are other good overview resources that go over the pre-2009 (I think the Wired article marks an epoch) history, I'm all ears for those as well. I ran across Monochrom's "hacking the spaces" but it's a little light on details.

Thanks in advance,
-Nate-