18 Feb
2002
18 Feb
'02
3:28 a.m.
Ron Hudson <rhudson(a)cnonline.net> wrote:
I live in Silicon Valley, and the places to get
component
type stuff are dwindling. Radio Shack no longer carries much
of the components they used to. I went into Frys for a 100K
pot the other day (for paddles for an apple II (ob ot)) and
there were NO pots... Radio Shack had various values but not
100 K. A small hole in the wall was the same (Schad elec-
tronics on 1st street)
It's not just you. It's cheaper to manufacture stuff elsewhere now
(seen on bottom of iBook: "Designed by Apple in California Assembled
in Taiwan") so there are fewer surplus lots of components for these
folks to buy cheap and sell dear. The wacky commercial real estate
market of the dot-com boom didn't help matters either, it forced some
of these folks out of business.
Take a look at <http://www.kce.com/junk.htm> for starters. Diffs that
I know of: Curtiss Trading Co. is gone. RA Enterprises is gone.
Sharon Industries is somewhere else now. Alltronics is apparently
mostly web-and-mail order these days, for a while they had moved in
with Schad but this appears to have not lasted.
Follow the link at the bottom to Bruce Lane's page:
<http://www.bluefeathertech.com/technoid/calswap.html>, which has a
lot of the same information as on the kce.com page, but you will find
that Opinions Vary. Sometimes you really need to go see for yourself.
-Frank McConnell