Electronics Surplus Stores, a Vanishing Breed

I was born in late 1950, and am pretty sure my first visit to Canal Street was probably before 1960, and it seemed that the whole place was drying up in the early '60s, as that big redevelopment was coming. But, for a couple years, it was just amazing to walk through all these shops with WW-II radio gear, aircraft parts and old IBM (vacuum tube) computers. Just buckets and baskets and boxes of interesting components, panels, tools and so on. They'd drag barrels and small tables full of merchandise out onto the sidewalk to showcase the wares they had. Complete mental overload for a kid who wanted to tinker with all that stuff!

Jon

Better that than having it thrown in a landfill! At least a few things were getting recycled for a second chance at life.

There was a time you could probably get Minuteman guidance computers on the surplus market, after the educational institutions got tired of trying to make them do anything useful. You don't WANT TO KNOW what those things cost the US Government.

Jon

Honey, at an electronics flea market? I noticed that, towards the end, Foothill was starting to sell clothes and laundry detergent and car parts and junk.

We kept bees for a number of years, until my wife got stung once and had a bad reaction. The doctor said "get rid of the bees or die."

What we need is a good crash.

I found a bin full of tunnel diodes at Haltek, and the guy at the counter wanted 10 cents each. I got about 50, and should have bargained for the entire bin.

Los Alamos Sales was awesome, an old food store plus its parking lot full of stuff from the lab. HP35's were $5 each. That's where I got my Krytron.

On Wednesday I drove from the Bay Area down to San Diego, to pick up the child-unit from college.

I made my usual stop in Van Nuys to get gas at Costco and to go to All Electronics .

When I moved to the Bay Area there were three electronics surplus stores, Halted Specialties, Haltek, and one other. Now we are down to just Halted . They recently moved to a new location, so at least temporarily the store is not like a disaster area. Halted tries to sell a lot of old test equipment that has historical value but that few people are buying.

All Electronics is very well organized and not cluttered by old test equipment that has been for sale for a decade or three. A lot of stuff is behind the counter, sometimes low-value items that I guess they've decided are theft prone, or prone to being mixed up in the bins. When you buy stuff in the store, they laboriously hand write out a ticket with everything you buy and the price. Halted has sheet of paper in their little shopping tote where you write down the price and quantity of each item yourself.

When I was in college in Florida I used to go to Skycraft .

MPJA has a lot of useful stuff too, but their shipping tends to be expensive, and they are often out of stock.

The loss of electronic manufacturing in the U.S. means a lot less real surplus parts. A networking company my friend worked for went out of business and Halted bought their inventory of networking adapters, hubs,

higher prices than what similar equipment sells for at Fry's or on Amazon.

Boo.

Surplus Sales of Nebraska is still around, but closed the showroom. Interesting selection of old parts at new prices. I went there once to see if the place was for real.

Fair is still in business.

I bought stuff from them when I was a kid.

I used to go to C&H Sales on Colorado Blvd. in Pasadena about every other Saturday back in the day- and visit Harbor Fright for cheap tools just down the street (on Foothill Blvd. actually). Gosh, there's a Whole Foods store across from the latter now. 8-(

They closed down but got kind of reconstituted in a new location. Not sure how good it is.

Active Surplus on Queen St. W. in Toronto used to be a great place to go- they shrunk as the area got more expensive (I think the fire guys read them the riot act one time and all the narrow aisles got cleaned up) and I think they've finally closed up shop from their last upstairs location (still retaining the life-size fake gorilla outside to the end).

And *way* back, City Surplus Sales on Dixie in the Toronto area had a warehouse full of aircraft bits and surplus WWII stuff. Got my first shortwave radio, some radar displays with 3JP1 CRTs and other cool stuff. They went legit and became an industrial distributor CISCO.

--sp

P.S.

Speaking of surplus, but mail-order, how many remember Poly Paks?

Bought one of these and got it to work (a few bits of it) with discrete transistors:

'Only' $250 for an 8080.. about 150 of them would be worth a house at the time.

I built a bunch of circuits using these things from Poly Paks- seemed tiny at the time (RTL logic) but they're 0.05" pitch - including a character generator that displayed 7-segment numbers from a counter on a TV:

Then there were John Meshna and others I can't remember..

--sp

Sure. They and Digikey got started about the same time, in more or less the same market. Shows you the importance of not choosing a stupid company name. ;)

I bought a few bags of resistors and dodgy 741s iirc. Never saw much use for logic as a hobby.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I remember Mike Quinn's. They had a yard sale one time around '87. Sold anything in the side yard by the pound. I got some old Control Data computer cards. Some of which were ferrite memory cards . I sold one recently on EBay but am keeping the other to frame display on the wall. Also got some EV mid-range horns with drivers. (still have those) and other misc parts all for 10 bucks. I think the disposability of modern electronics has helped in killing the surplus business. Nothing but faded memories now.

I'll stop there on my next trip. I take I-210 right by where they are located.

Is there anything made in recent times that you'd actually *want* to "hang onto"? It's all, "same ol', same ol'"...

I keep an ASR33, a Sun Voyager and a Personal Reader "for nostalgia". Most of the other "interesting" things are not electrical/electronic.

I remember when they advertised used ROMs, with the tagline "May have some useful codes."

I also ordered from a place in Florida, "Knapp Electronics" whose catalog was printed on newsprint with the warning "You only get one catalog from us."

In college, one quarter they let me teach the senior projects lab because they were short of grad students, even though I was just an undergrad. It was a revelation.

About 30% of the students had gone into electrical engineering because they had been designing and building things since childhood. They all knew how to build a project.

About 70% went into EE because it was a lucrative field and they were good at math and science, but most of them had a lot of trouble designing anything.

This was a class where almost everyone gets an A, but I gave my friend a B because his project was so bad. One student built some sort of device and it had two power cords coming out of the box, and I asked him why he didn't connect the AC power together inside and have only one cord and he said that he didn't know that that would work.

I taught a senior-level CS course (and a graduate level MIS course but that's a different story ;) for a few years at a fairly well known college, back in the '80s. I had a few students who were fairly decent, mostly IBM employees trying to get a degree for advancement. Most were hopeless. They couldn't even convert base-2 to base-10 by hand, much less write pseudo-code to do it.

Grading was the toughest part. How do you grade a senior CS student who has no clue about even the basics of his chosen field?

During the 1960's, most everyone in my engineering college were there to get a student deferment and thus avoid touring Viet Nam. That included me as I would have been quite happy to continue working as a techician in the land mobile radio biz, were it not for the draft. In order to maintain a student deferment, it was necessary to maintain a decent grade point average and to complete a fairly large number of technical classes. Most of the survivors were eventually capable of designing things that worked. Those that didn't were drafted, which was a rather effective educational incentive plan. The only exceptions were a contingent of foreign exchange students from Iran, and the few women that took engineering classes, mostly to find suitable husbands.

Geez Spef, I didn't know.

Last trip there was a year ago, when things were still ticking. It's a two hour commute from out here in dandelion country.

Was picking up 75 kilos of surge generator and line cuopling network I'd built for un-named and never been paid for. Had to buy a dolly from College St Home Hardware to schlep it home on the train/bus. So no extra hands for anything really interesting. There was a TEK7000 mainframe hiding at the back of one of the shelves that would have been a likely candidate.

RL

I do. They would sell you a bag of 50 or 100 transistors, cheap, a few of which actually worked.

I have a 304 bit core plane!