My recent article about language drift in electronics over the past half century or so (see “Old Electronics Terms Show Language Drift Over the Decades”) seems to have generated a lot of interest, so let’s take another time-traveling walk through the same time period, and let’s focus on how young people might get interested in electronics. I’m going to use my own experience and compare it with today’s opportunities. Some things have changed; some things have stayed the same; and some have died out and have either reappeared or are in the process of reappearing.
When I was born in the early 1950s, plastic model kits were just becoming popular. These kits are one of the first stepping stones for young people to use when learning about the component parts of real engineered artifacts and for learning how to follow complex, detailed directions. My preference was for automobile model kits, particularly from AMT and Monogram, but I built ships and airplanes from Revell, Renwal, and Lindburgh as well. (I lusted for the Renwal Atomic Cannon kit but could never afford it.) While building these model kits, I learned about engine parts (alternators, fan belts, distributors, valve covers, intake and exhaust manifolds, and exhaust headers), chassis components (springs, shocks, differentials, A-arms, and steering components), and interior parts (steering wheels, instrument clusters, shifters, and seat belts). There’s a fundamental element to all engineering that requires you to learn about component parts, whether it’s for automotive engineering or electronics. This knowledge has stayed with me.
The plastic model kit manufacturers ran into serious trouble starting in the 1980s as video games became the dominant recreational activity for young people. Soon, the big-name model kit companies were being passed around from owner to owner like a contagious virus. Today, a company called Round2 LLC owns several familiar, old-line model kit brands including AMT, MPC, Hawk/Lindberg, and Polar Lights (a descendent of Aurora). Meanwhile, Monogram merged with Revell. That company was purchased by Hobbico – which went bankrupt in 2018 and is now owned by Quantum Capital Partners. Consequently, you can still buy plastic model kits from these 1960s brands in many stores and online, but they cost a lot more money these days.
I quickly graduated to model rockets, particularly kits from Estes Industries in Penrose, Colorado. Model rocketry taught you even more about engineering. You learned to make your own component parts such as rocket fins, and you learned that there were right and wrong ways to make these parts. For example, the grain of the balsa wood needed to be aligned with the leading edge of a rocket fin or else the fin would be weak and could break quite easily. You learned that if you did not use the right flame-proof wadding to protect the parachute, the rocket engine’s ejection gases would melt the parachute and your rocket would fall to earth and break. (Ask me how I know.) You also learned some real engineering terminology such as center of mass, center of pressure, and specific impulse.
Estes was founded by Vern Estes, who invented a machine that automated the manufacture of model rocket engines. He worked tirelessly to make model rocketry into a credible hobby and to get the U.S. Post Office to allow rocket engines to be shipped in the mail. Estes Industries was founded in 1958, just in time for me to catch the model rocketry bug. Vern and his wife Gleda eventually sold the company to Damon Corp, and the company then was passed around and eventually was sold to Estes Industries LLC in 2018. So, you can still get Estes rockets from multiple sources.
Estes rockets circa 1973. Image credit: Estes Industries
In the mid-1960s, electronics started getting popular, given a boost by military and aerospace projects. I became interested in electronics in the late 1960s and started buying electronic kits from Radio Shack, Heathkit, and Eico. Radio Shack sold a line of simple, inexpensive electronic kits in plastic packaging that doubled as the project box. These were “P-box” or “project box” kits.
Radio Shack started in 1921 as one store that was devoted to radio hobbyists through its storefront and through mail order. Tandy Corporation, a leather company, bought Radio Shack in 1962, and, over the decades, the company grew into an 8000-store behemoth. These Radio Shack stores were part consumer electronics store, part electronics hobbyist store, part personal computer store, and part CB radio store. Radio Shack had a mature catalog business, but the company completely missed the Internet e-commerce revolution. Companies like Amazon and eBay ate Radio Shack’s lunch, and the company declared bankruptcy in 2015. Nearly all the U.S. Radio Shack stores closed, with the exception of a few franchise stores, and the real estate was sold off. (See “The Radio Shack at the End of the Universe.”) So those 8000 stores aren’t coming back. Today, there’s activity on the RadioShack (new spelling) Website, but it appears that the company is mostly interested in selling consumer electronics and related consumer gear once it gets reorganized.
Heathkit started as an aircraft company in 1911, went bankrupt, and was resurrected as an electronics kit company after World War II when surplus electronic components from the war effort were cheap and plentiful. I built several Heathkits, including digital clocks, test equipment, and a microwave oven. I had to drive to Heathkit’s headquarters in Benton Harbor, Michigan to pick up the microwave oven. I was 17 and drove my mother’s 1967 Pontiac Catalina station wagon from Louisville, Kentucky to Michigan. It was my first long-distance drive. The microwave oven kit barely fit in the back of our station wagon. Along the way, as the number of completed kits grew, I became very familiar with the look of electronic components and learned to troubleshoot circuits from the schematic. Heathkit’s documentation was always world class.
The Heathkit Microwave Oven placed precariously near the railing on a boat. Image credit: Heathkit
Heath discontinued its electronic kit business in 1992 and focused on its educational business. After passing through the hands of several owners who knew next to nothing about Heathkit’s businesses, the company went bankrupt in 2012. A year later, the company’s Website was revived, the company was reorganized, and today, you can purchase three Heathkits: a digital clock, an AM radio receiver, and a microprocessor trainer. You can also purchase upgrades and components for some of the company’s original kits from the past. It’s a far cry from the glory that was once Heathkit, but at least they’re not gone.
That history brings us to today. What are today’s choices for introducing young people to the world of electronics? Actually, I think we have more choices today than we did back in my early days. As I’ve mentioned, kids can still get started with plastic model kits and model rockets. Those once and future model kit companies have hung on in some form or another. Heathkit is still with us, but if you want to build electronic kits, you’ll have an easier time finding low-cost kits made in China that are being sold on Amazon and eBay. Want to build a digital clock? No problem. Want to build a frequency counter or a component tester? Also, not a problem.
You’ll find a variety of kits that you can order online from companies such as Amazon, DigiKey, Jameco, Sparkfun, and American Science and Surplus, among others. You can also get individual electronic components from these vendors, delivered in a day or two. It’s not as convenient as Radio Shack, but the variety and prices are far better. These kits are shockingly inexpensive, but they have one drawback relative to Heathkits. The instructions and documentation barely exist. These kits are not great for learning electronics theory.
Today’s most popular electronic kits for “makers” (today’s au courant term for “hobbyists”) are single-board computers (SBCs) such as the Arduino, one of the several Raspberry PI boards, or the BeagleBone. The electronics hobby sphere is filled with these kits. For education, you can rely on large online communities that support these SBCs with tutorials, projects, and accessories. The vibrant world of hobby SBCs is far larger than the kit-building world of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
That’s the state of the art in the electronics hobby today. How about you? Did you build model kits? Model rockets? What were your experiences with electronics while growing up? Please leave your comments below.
I also built model rockets, Radio Shack P-box kits and Dynaco and Hafler audio gear. My .mom got used to the smell of solder, but put her foot down when I wanted to build my Dynaco ST150 amplifier on the dining room table. I owned some Heathkit gear but never built any. I grew up to be an electrical engineer, and I can’t imagine the same trajectory if not for all the kits that were available when I was young. I see now lots of DIY activity, so it’s clear that folks still like to build their own “stuff”. I hope building and creating never go out of style!
Thanks Analog_Mike. Your experiences sure sound familiar. I didn’t know Hafler sold kits. You learn something new every day. There is indeed lots of DIY activity and you can get a lot of kits from China. For example, I just bought a kit for $1.69 on eBay and it shipped from China. The vendor saved a penny by printing no instructions, so you have to go find them on the Web and print them yourself. Typical of kits from China. We were babied with Heathkit’s superlative manuals, the gold standard.
I’m 10 years ahead of you. In early grade school I had Erector sets. Really good for learning manual assembly with little screws & nuts. Started reading Popular Electronics in 1956 in junior high school. I built EICO kits and a Heathkit or two. My pride & joy was an EICO Oscilloscope. Everything has been microprocessor based for several years now. Not as exciting as things used to be.
I had an Erector set too, harvey@plexon.com. It was the Master Builder set. But it was clear that A. C. Gilbert designed the activities that appeared in the Erector manual back in the 1930s, especially with projects like the carousel and the parachute ride. So while I enjoyed the motorized Erector fun, I preferred the Kenner building sets. The turnpike set was obviously derived from the new Eisenhower Interstate system with its cloverleaf overpasses and the buildings were clearly based on the glass-and-steel Bauhaus school of architecture, although I never heard the term back then. The Hydrodynamic Building Set was mind blowing, and colored the water that flowed through its pipes with green food coloring for dramatic effect. Those were truly creative toys of the 1950s. There are many building sets available today, but I fear that video games now have a far bigger draw. Although games like Minecraft encourage the itch to build, I think there’s a visceral aspect to physical building blocks and building sets that’s missing in Minecraft, however Minecraft is infinitely more flexible.
My Dad had a Radionics kit given to him (UK 1960s) with which you could build various different radio designs. I found it in the loft because it didn’t interest him so I used it, but I didn’t want to build radios, I wanted to build things you couldn’t buy off the shelf, like things that went bleep. So I bought Practical Electronics magazine and learned how to build a multivibrator, took it to school and drive my teachers nuts with random bleeps during lessons. At this time, late 60s UK, very few things bleeped and the mysterious source remained a mystery.
I went on to take a degree in Electronic Engineering but was soon seduced by the dark side and have spent my career programming. Since retiring I use ESP32s to build midi controllers, thermostats, coil winders, brushless motors and loads of other stuff that is of no use to man or beast but it satisfies my need to make things.
Quite a story, John. Thanks. Glad you scratched that itch at an early age.
My parents too a subscription out to Practical Electronics magazine for me when I was about 12 I think (this was Practical Electronics in the UK — I think there was a different magazine with this name in the USA). I too started off building things like multivibrators — good old days. In fact I mention this in the column I just posted: There’s More Than One Way to Become an Engineer (Part 1) https://www.eejournal.com/article/theres-more-than-one-way-to-become-an-engineer-part-1/
I’m not sure why, Max, but electronics magazines in the UK and Australia always really impressed me with their production values. In Australia, they might even attach etched pcbs for the cover project. I wonder if this is because of the British concept of a News Agent, which we’ve not adopted in the US. Barnes and Noble is clearly not a “News Agent,” and neither was Borders or Readmores before that.
Thank you for this, the article made me remember my first electronics “experiments”. In Europe in the early 80ies we had “Kosmos” Electronics kits with a clip system that allowed you to reconfigure the circuits and build different things (only one at a time). One kit even had a “nice” enclosure with switches, LEDs and analog meter. The instructions were simple and educational and took you all the way to making your own FM radio (with the disclaimer that you could only operate it if your household paid the radio (listening) licensing fees.. I found a collector that posted pictures of kits with documentation (in German).. ahh the memories and boy have we come far… https://patric-sokoll.de/SonstigeSammlungen/Kosmos%20E200/Kosmos%20E200.html
I’m happy to hear this article brought back memories, mike.stengle@knowres.ch. It certainly brought back many memories for me as I was writing it. That Kosmos kit looks very nice. We had experimenters kits here in the US, but none looked that good. Also, we can’t put photos of nude women on the box covers here in the US, at least I’ve not seen that on any of the electronics kits I purchased.
I thank my chemistry-professor father for starting me building electronics, though I quickly surpassed his ability. I started learning electronics from the 1958 Radio Amateur’s Handbook when I was in fourth grade. I started building crystal radios and vacuum-tube radios. I was unable to memorize Morse Code well enough to try for a ham-radio license. Instead, I built crystal-controlled converters for shortwave radio broadcast listening on AM radios. I am still using the newest of those converters (that I built in 1979) to listen to Radio New Zealand Pacific on 9700 kHz 0900-1100 UTC just before dawn in New England. In high school, I built a full set of Heathkit test equipment, of which I still have my GD-1 grid-dip oscillator, which is used to measure the resonant frequencies of tuned circuits. In college, I learned FORTRAN on an IBM 1620 punched-card computer. In college and grad school, I majored in physics. My father wisely suggested that physics would better prepare me in the fundamentals, and I graduated with a master’s degree in 1973 from Dartmouth. At Dartmouth, I learned FORTRAN and BASIC on the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System. I considered switching to electrical engineering, but Dartmouth’s EE department was still centered on old technology I already knew. My timing was accidentally exquisite: The microprocessor revolution was gestating in the late 1960s, when software and hardware were entirely separate. In 1972, I obtained a copy of the Intel 8008 MCS-8 Micro Computer Set User’s Guide. I could do both hardware and software at once and entered the workforce in 1973, a year after the Intel 8008 microprocessor appeared, and work has come to me ever since, until I retired in 2010. In 1974, I built a TTL-based video terminal using Intel 4096-bit DRAMs. I bought a Microsystems International 8008 CPU to experiment with, but quickly switched to the Intel 8080. I lived the design experience as the analog-to-digital converter in a radio receiver steadily moved from between the listener’s ears to the antenna.
Thanks for the personal history, traneusee. Sounds like you and solid-state electronics flowered together. You’re a few years ahead of me. I was a freshman in college when Intel announced the 4004 in 1971.
Thank you for a great article. I grew up in Eastern Europe around the same time, and I am amazed that we had kind of the same experience of playing with technology.
Model airplanes, model engines, model cars, model rockets. So much fun!
I nearly got into chemistry school because of the rockets, but after I discovered electronics I felt that was my path. We didn’t have too many electronic stores and parts were very expensive, but after I moved in the USA it was heaven.
I was told later by a former Chinese coworker how he built the first TV from parts in a remote village in China, and it was the only one like in a county. The whole village came to watch the miracle.
I can relate to that, under communism and after the war, TVs were pretty rare and very expensive before 1970. In my grandma’s village there was only one TV, and lots of people gathered to watch the first moon landing, including me. The local TV repair technician was like a doctor, doing house calls to replace bulbs or fix things.
I think many people miss RadioShack, and it would be great if they ever manage to bring their products back in some store like home depot or related. I managed to spend quite a bit in the nearest store when they closed.
On the positive, there was another store that had a pretty good selection parts, Fry’s electronics. At some point they were gone like RadioShack, but there’s another popular store chain in some places, Microcenter, microcenter.com.
As of now, there’s also the Raspberry Pi and alike, the 3d printing, cnc milling and so on.
Indeed, there are a lot more selections at Amazon, ebay, but again, not the same if you had these right there on the shelf, so you can touch them, go through the whole drawer of potentiometers, or potentiometer caps, and pick all you want, color, size etc. You can do that at some hardware stores but it’s not the same, plus you have a much smaller selection.
I think these part kits should be more popular, because they are like toys, be they for adults or children. You have to learn some principles on something simpler.
The world today is pushed into consuming and buying, and relatively few people are into building something, or repairing. Yes, there is this convenience when a newer TV or DVD player is much cheaper than the one you bought 10 years ago, I get it.
But understanding common things makes the children safer and smarter, I’d say. It also makes the world smarter, eventually, and more practical, or at least prepared for different jobs. We’re no longer living in the woods, having to chop trees and milk cows, but we have to have some skills in the current kind of technology world, as these electronic things are at any corner.
I noticed at some point a lot of comments about “snowflake generation”, but talking to my car mechanic I learned they are hiring and can’t find young people. He complained that the younger people coming to apply for a 40-60$ per hour job and learn on the job can’t remember fundamentals, like “righty-tighty” to tighten a screw. Or even worse, he gets once a week to clean engines after some 16 year old driving an expensive car given by their parents filled the tank with diesel instead of gasoline. He stopped doing such things due to lack of personnel.
I think it was a fair assessment, because later when I started a university program in the US I encountered people unable to understand simple things about computers. Lots of them. Or even simple logical things, like if you have to do X things in a 15 weeks trimester, how many you have to do per week?
You can laugh or cry, but there is something to address here.
I think all people should be educated in some practical things, beyond pushing buttons or ordering from Amazon or call the service. This has to happen at school or preschool level.
Even if you will be a doctor or a lawyer, you must learn how to replace a tire, a fuse, fix a cable, or apply a band aid. You have to start somewhere. You must have fun with building something. This fun should be also accessible. Children play more in places where they have more playgrounds. It’s kind of common sense. We need less distraction and more practical things on TV.
And we need some kind of RadioShack back. Before we turn into a world like in “Idiocracy”.
Thanks, clixandru1, for your long response. I’d be interested in which Eastern European country you lived in your early years. The auction site is loaded with Soviet parts from the 1970s and 1980s. The history of these Communist block electronics component companies is little known here in the US. I lived in Silicon Valley during the heyday of Fry’s and we had a MicroCenter in Santa Clara as well. I frequented these stores. I also watched MicroCenter leave (although it seems they may have returned, recently) and I watched the downfall ofr Fry’s, from perhaps too close a distance. Fry’s could have owned the mail-order electronics business, they had all the needed components enterprise-wise, but lacked the leadership to add the Amazon model to their retail operations until it was too late. The history of these Communist block electronics component companies is little known here in the US. Although it’s easy to stereotype young people as something negative, I’ve come to see that things are merely different. There are schools, like the Silicon Valley Career Technical Education center in San Jose or Dixie Technical College near where I now live, that give young people the opportunity for practical, hands-on learning. Heathkit is gone (nearly) but the number of electronics experimenter kits available on Amazon is staggering. Much of China’s home-grown electronics training materials is now dribbling into the West, but you need to know how and where to look. The adoption of Raspberry Pis, in their many iterations, and Arduinos, allow young people to develop embedded projects that were completely out of my reach in the late 1960s, because microprocessors had yet to be invented. It’s a different world, not necessarily a worse one. As for cars and car repair, if you watch the Kansas-centric car channels on YouTube (Hoovie’s Garage, Car Wizard, and Watch JR Go), you’ll learn that modern cars are increasingly unfixable due to the extreme engine choises (GDI, turbo 4-cylinder engines, low-friction piston rings, etc), the increased use of plastics that embrittle in a few short years, and the skyrocketing cost of increasingly complex replacement parts. Car repair is at risk of becoming a thing of the past in a few short years. I don’t know what to think of that.
In the early 1980s, my company’s microfilm datasheet system included datasheets of Russian TTL in DIP packages built to Soviet Inch = 2.50 centimeters rather than U.S. Inch = 2.54 centimeters dimensions, so Soviet DIPs would be a little too small for U.S. sockets. The distance between pins 1 and 7 was 1.5 centimeters = 15 millimeters for the Soviet DIP, and 1.524 centimeters = 15.24 millimeters for the U.S. DIP.
I find that hard to believe, traneusee. We were led to believe that every Soviet product was bigger and better than products made in the decadent West. You mean six inches in the US was actually bigger than “back in the USSR”?