I doubt many of our regular readers will be surprised to hear that at least one of The Reveres was sort of geeky while young (now, of course, he's just sort of geeky while old). I thought about this objectively (geeks don't think we are really geeky; we just think the things we do that others call geeky are "interesting") when I ran across (via Slashdot: warning sign #1) a link to The Technologizer (warning sign #2) picking the Ten Most Tarnished Brands in Tech. This isn't about scandals. It's about once proud brandnames that nobody cares about any more, like Netscape or Commodore. And on the list was one near and dear to my young geekdom: Heathkit.
Heathkit was a company in Benton Harbor, Michigan that made electronics kits. The manuals to assemble them were incredibly detailed but easy to follow, with little check-boxes (actually parentheses; they are burned into my brain) for each step. I was a ham radio operator in those days (I think I got my Novice Class license when I was 11 and my General Class license a year later) and my first Heathkits were ham radio equipment, I think the venerable Heathkit AT-1, a 30 watt CW (continuous wave, meaning only Morse code), which I used with an army surplus J-38 telegraph key. An 80 meter dipole ran along the house as an antenna. The writer of the Ten Most Tarnished Brands, Harry McCracken, is younger than I am, so by the time he was aware of Heathkits you could also get stereos, TVs and all sorts of other stuff (my son and I once assembled a Heathkit metal detector). Here's how McCracken recalls it:
There was a time when there was no better way to establish your geek cred than to assemble a Heathkit radio, TV, stereo system, or other piece of electronic gadgetry-and doing it yourself saved you money, too. (Among the company’s fans: Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who assembled a hundred Heathkits, and the distinguished literary critic Hugh Kenner.)
When the personal computer revolution came along, Heathkit became a significant manufacturer of early PCs, too, leading to its 1979 purchase by Zenith. But increasingly sophisticated, miniaturized electronics made it tough to save money by assembling a kit rather than buying a ready-made item. In 1992, Heathkit stopped selling kits. (Harry McCracken, The Technologizer)
RIP, Heathkit. Oh, it still exists, but it's a different beast altogether, now called Healthkit Educational Systems, selling training materials in the computing and telecommunications industry. I'll bet they don't use those little check-offs, anymore. Likely some fancy interactive training software.
I think having been a young ham radio operator (I foolishly let my license lapse about 50 years ago!), communicating with others using Morse Code with equipment built from kits is pretty good geek cred, but I'm guessing there are readers out there who are thinking, "Big deal. I'm geekier than that!" Maybe. I have a lot of respect for our readers. But believe me, you don't know the half of it.
I went to a public high school in the 1950s that had a public address system for making school-wide announcements. Popular music was changing during that era, with Bill Haley and The Comets played on the radio cheek-by-jowl with Doris Day and Eddie Fisher. For reasons I cannot remember, the school principal decided he would turn the public address system over to 5 students over 5 days to play music of their choice to the entire school during the 8:30 - 9:00 am time slot just before Home Room. In other words, we got to be DJs. I was a 13 year old Freshman and, again, for reasons I can't remember, was given one of the 5 slots (it seems highly improbable, now, because I was always causing trouble of a more cerebral sort in class). My choice of music that day will go a long way to explaining why "getting to first base" was a purely baseball concept for me.
Because I used my time to play something I liked and that I thought my classmates would like: a movement from an oratorio by Dmitri Shostakovich's written in 1948 to celebrate the Soviet post-war reforestation program, called Song of the Forests. I still like it, although it's a bit schlocky.
What was the reaction? To tell you the truth I don't remember any reaction at all. I don't remember any class mate mentioning it or making fun of me (or for that matter, saying the equivalent of: "That was awesome!"). However there is a kind of geek, and I am an example, who are famously oblivious. So probably the only practical effect was that first base seemed a long way off.
Of course I didn't know then that after the fifties would come to the sixties and in certain circles Shostakovich was a sure fire way to get on base. All of them. Heathkit? Not so much.
Happy New Year everyone!
The Reveres, New Years Day, 2010
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Ah yes, I had forgotten the Heathkits. Received the AM radio kit and a book club membership as gifts back in the late 50's or early 60's. The first selection from the book club was John Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. It arrived complete with a form letter from the author.
Heathkit was absolutely central to early geekdom, at least in the U.S. I also got a shortwave radio kit about fifty-five years ago, which I remember had these tiny tong-like clips at the end of the wires connecting various pieces. You pushed the little tongs over half-inch silver posts and were amazed that the thing actually worked. I also made model airplanes that had little engines that fired up (probably burned benzene or something) and sort of flew. Now I do all my work on Apple products of one form or another - wonder if that was pre-ordained by early exposure to Heathkit.
Sam: Ah, yes. Model airplanes. Balsa wood and the intoxicating smell of glue (toluene, I think). And the turn of the 20th century model car kits, where you put hubs on the wheel spokes by heating the plastic and pushing on the molten material (if you've never done it, this description won't make any sense). I also built crystal radios and used to listen to Fibber McGee and Molly under the covers at night with earphones when I was supposed to be sleeping. Explains a lot, I suspect.
My housemate and I put together a Heathkit TV set in the early 70s. It didn't work when we plugged it in so we had to truck it to a store about 20 miles away. I still remember tenderly cradling the picture tube, with its unprotected neck, in a nest of blankets. Heathkit told us the first thing they did before troubleshooting was re-soldering everything because that's mostly where the problems were. Does anybody remember a magazine called ROM? Volume 1, Number 1, July 1977 had a great article "Space, Order, and Good Soldering" by Ed Hershberger that recommended honing skills on simple Heathkit projects. My Heathkit alarm clock still works; I expect it will outlast me.
Amen, Ejay. Soldering was a bitch.
Soldering was one of the few things I was really good at. Used a Weller gun and flux, heated the parts first. Never missed.
My first Heathkit was a GR-64 shortwave receiver. How geeky am I that I remember the model number from over 30 years ago? Building it was educational; for example, I learned that I could hear my flesh sizzle before feeling the pain of grabbing the wrong end of a soldering iron at 1 am. I became much more focussed while soldering after that. 73 de KA9VSZ
I had many misspent hours as an anti-geek,(like anti-matter not anti social) riding Heathkit and Rupp mini bikes as part of my local neighborhood "wild bunch" in "high" school.
I did build an amplifier or 3 as well.....
"I also built crystal radios and used to listen to Fibber McGee and Molly under the covers at night with earphones when I was supposed to be sleeping. Explains a lot, I suspect."
Too funny, it was the late 60's for me and it was Jean Shepherd
on WOR outta NYC
The first step after completing a kit or building something from a schematic we called the "smoke test" -- plug it in and see if anything starts to smoke.
glock, I was a big fan of Jean Shepherd and Long John Nebel in the early '60s. Nebel's show is where I first ran across James Randi. Without the influence of Shep and Randi my life would not have been the same.
Pieter B,
wow. I had totally forgotten about Long John. Both shows were great fertilizer for a growing brain.
I mean that in a good way.....
Heathkit! You could afford Heathkit! I had to go bargain basement. I had a two transistor radio kit we bought down at Radio Row. It actually worked. Then they tore down Radio Row to build the World Trade Center. When the World Trade Center went down I had hopes, but none of the Ground Zero plans mentioned bringing back Radio Row.
There's still a big soldering culture out there. Check out the crazy sundial clock at Evil Mad Scientist, it uses LEDs to cast shadows to tell the time. There's one gnomon, but three LED colors give you hours, minutes and seconds. One of those little Arduino processors drives it, and the kit promises lots of relaxing soldering. Ah, I can smell the heated rosin.
One big change is that more women are involved, otherwise you wouldn't find projects like the Missile Command Circle Skirt, and there wouldn't be a demand for Lily Pad garment compatible microprocessors for wearable command and control buses. Mind you, these young women aren't getting to first base either, unless, of course, their first base is on the moon.
Yes, I could buy the cheaper ones. Paper route. But no transistors. Only vacuum tubes then. But they were really fun. But the DIY sometimes involved hidden expenses, like the tools for punching holes in the metal chasis for the vacuum tubes. And there weren't any stores to buy the stuff in the early 50s around where I was. Had to send away for everything.