Heathkit is back

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Stoller
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No, Heathkit is not back.

Someone bought the rights to the name, and apparently whatever was left over, and is making another stab. This about 20 years after the company stopped making kits, after the company made a big fuss about getting back into kits a few years back, with a couple of ridiculous offerings and a suggetion of more, and then boing bankrupt.

This has to be another company starting up, having bought the right to use the name. They aren't offering kits, they haven't got any products yet, time will tell.

"Heathkit" means nothing in itself. It's not the name that matters, it's being a viable business making electronic kits. In the old days, Heathkig put out a wide range of products, and all the kits were designed to be put together by anyone (they'd test out the new kits on the secretaries who'd never put a kit together before). Heathkit wasn't just about electronics and amateur radio, it was about the Boonie Bike, and the organ kit, and the marine electronics, and the stereo equiment, and so on. They offered a product that actually was lower in price than buying an assembled product, so endless people with little or no interest in electronics or actually building followed the instructions and got the item they wanted at a reduced price.

And that faded as electronics got more complicated, as things moved from hand wired tube equipment to solid state equipment that could easily be assembled by machinery. The kits became a liability, no lnoger a means of saving money but something that cost extra to produce. So they lost all the wide range of customers who wanted a tv set cheaper or that fish finder cheaper, which meant only the people who wanted to build kits were customers, and rising costs meant they couldn't pay all the bills.

The name doesn't matter, producing viable kits that won't cost a whole lot is. And of course, one hallmark of a Heathkit was the detailed construction manuals, there are plenty of kits still available but most of them require some skill to put together, require some skill to get going.

Heathkit won't be back unless they can produce products, and ones that people are interested in and willing to pay for.

And we don't see any of that yet.

I should point out that a few years ago, someone made a big fuss about how he was going to relaunch Popular Electronics. He claimed he'd bought the rights to the name, and then had some kickstarter campaign that never reached its objective. Got a lot of hype, people orgasming at the mere mention of "Popular Electronics", but it was all misleading. The name didn't mean a thing, it was contents that mattered. If he spent much on the rights to the name (and oddly I never saw any verifying statement to that effect), he wasted the money that was better spent on trying to launch a magazine. The whole project faded, not much trace of it remains.

I should also point out that the pompous fool had a very misleading understanding of the magazine. His declaration made it sound like PE was only useful when it launched the ALtair 8800, and he didn't know that Steve Wozniak was the real designer of the Apple II (or that Steve Jobs was off elsewhere when the HomeBrew Computer Club started up), or that Bill Gates was off in Boston and then New Mexico when the Homebrew Computer Club was started, and likely never attended. After all, there is the famous "Open Letter to Computer Hobbyists" where he denounces the illegal copying of Microsoft BASIC, and that was very much aimed at Homeberw Computer Club.

It's not a wonder that he failed, he didn't understand the magazine.

This new project sounds identical. The name is more important than the product, make lots of hype early on but no products. Time will tell. Heathkit when it went back into kits a few years back, that got a lot of hype, people too excited by the notion to realize the first few kits were useless, just blindly accepting that "heathkit was back in the kit business".

Michael

Reply to
Michael Black

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