General Discussion

I used to order everything by mail and wait a week or two to get it. If I discovered at the last minute I'd left something out of my order I'd ride my bike to the local Radio Shack to get it. But a single transistor there, for example, might cost five or ten times what a mail order transistor did.

It was not a place where I could get any questions about electronics answered. It seemed to me the employees hardly knew anything about electronics or computers and it irked me when they tried to "help."

When I got my drivers license I could drive to the city where there were several much larger electronics shops I could choose from, some with knowledgeable staff and interesting customers -- lot's of retired guys who were happy to talk about their radio and electronics hobbies. One shop had a stack of old radio and electronics magazines they sold for ten cents each. Sometimes they'd just give them to me.

My grandpa was a good source of information too but he wasn't much interested in transistors or integrated circuits. He was still building stuff with vacuum tubes. Foolish youth that I was, I assumed much of his knowledge was obsolete. It wasn't until I was taking physics in college that I realized my grandfather knew all that stuff and that I'd been an idiot. It didn't matter that he preferred vacuum tubes to transistors or slide rules to calculators.