Ed_Greenberg@3mail.3com.com (02/06/91)
>Eventually, RS became the large portion of Tandy, and I believe the >craft business is almost completely gone. We have a "Tandy Crafts" store near my home (San Carlos Avenue in San Jose) but their hours are 10-5 Mon-Sat so I haven't been able to get in there, the few times I've wanted to try. It's an old dusty store, from what I can see, and it's not clear to me how anyone can make any money with such limited access by the public (in this day and age.) > [Modertor: Say! Speaking of Heathkit ... what are *they* doing > these days? Are they still around? Many people recently got a Heathkit catalog. I think that the mailing list included the FCC Amateur Radio Operators database, since all the hams I know got one addressed to their FCC mailing addresses. It was pitiful. About 30% of the stuff in the catalog was buildable. The rest was sold assembled-only. The ham gear line has been decimated, the stereo/television line is about gone, and their concept of building a computer is to plug the boards in.
gordonl@microsoft.UUCP (Gordon LETWIN) (02/10/91)
In article <16709@accuvax.nwu.edu>, Ed_Greenberg@3mail.3com.com writes: > Many people recently got a Heathkit catalog. > It was pitiful. About 30% of the stuff in the catalog was buildable. > The rest was sold assembled-only ... their concept > of building a computer is to plug the boards in. Heath made plenty of mistakes, for sure, but they're not totally responsible for their downfall. Have you looked inside a state of the art computer today? I just examined the motherboard of a Compaq 386/20e with an eye towards diagnosing/repairing it. It seemed that half of the chips were ASIC, they were nearly all .05" lead spaced surface mount, with many many high pin-count (or is it leg-count?) chips. I've had years of experience hacking electronics, but I couldn't remove and replace even one of those high count SM chips without special tools and a lot of practice. Can you imagine regular folks building a board with hundreds of them on it? And then testing -- kit folks have to be able to test and diagnose what they build. You need something like signature analysis to test a board like this ... you can't do it with a voltmeter or even a scope. So Heath is pretty much forced into offering you preassembled and pretested boards, unless you want a computer made from socketed MSI which would be the size of your desk and cost much more than a prebuilt one. gordon letwin (I worked for Heath fifteen years ago, but that doesn't matter...)