I don't remember what my point was or where the original notion that kits often cost more that ready-made, except that if one sells kits, the folks who buy them usually are competent and capable of fixing their mistakes. If you sell both kits and ready-made, not only do you have to offer tech support to the buyers of the ready-made product because you attract a wholly less competent buyer, but a goodly share of your kit buyers are peoplenot otherwise competent hoping to save a few dollars by messing the kit up and then having your tech support people nursemaid them through the repair. I remember that the kits I bought were accompanied by a parts inventory, an assembly drawing, a schematic, and an extensive set of assembly and checkout instructions, none of which accompanies today's PC-oriented products. You're lucky if you can figure out from any of the paperwork, who built the product and whom to call if you have a problem. The kit, of course, has to be properly documented. In today's ready-made environment, little documentation accompanies a product, though even that's not often used. Today, the kit would be offered not so people can enjoy building it, though that's an added benefit for those who really do enjoy it, but rather to circumvent FCC restrictions if that's still possible. The FCC testing would keep almost any of the products of this sort with which I became familiar back in the '70's off the market, first because they would knock out TV reception for a considerable distance, and secondly because these volume in which they were built would not cover the cost of the testing. If one took the films used twenty years ago for, say, an S-100 board set and made it available as a kit, i.e. with all the IC's, passives, and hardware, it would cost quite a bit more than it did back 20 years ago. That's because of inflation and because labor to buy, stock , kit, and document the thing would cost more, not just the difference for inflation, but really more, because the labor cost buys less these days, and because people simply expect more than they once did. It would also make sense to silkscreen as much of the documentation for jumper and switch settings onto the board so the user can't lose it. Though the old IMSAI boards I have are solder-masked, the old ALTAIR ones are not. That could complicate building a kit as well, particularly for folks not experienced with soldering. You're certainly right about the cost of documentation. That's why it's hard to recommend LINUX and some of the rather excellent pieces of software work which have been done in conjunction with it. The documentation is generally quite poor, and always several generations out of date. Frequently one finds places where key words and phrases have been left out . . . words like "not" . . . Dick -----Original Message----- From: Philip.Belben(a)pgen.com <Philip.Belben(a)pgen.com> To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers <classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu> Date: Wednesday, March 31, 1999 10:04 AM Subject: Re: Kits vs ready-made (was RE: Rebirth of IMSAI) up to don't need for such.