Polycom’s co-founder on the best investment he ever made | Hacker News Reader

Polycom’s co-founder on the best investment he ever made

backchannel.com

111 pointssteven41 comments

The quote about Woz using a TRS-80 for phone phreaking is a misquote of the referenced Wireless article. I'm sure the "one" that Woz bought was a touch tone dialer, not a TRS-80.

Read about the biggest tech stories of the 20th century, and RadioShack keeps popping up: Long before he founded Netscape, Marc Andreessen learned to program tooling around on a TRS-80, one of the first affordable personal computers and one of the first devices RadioShack ever produced. Kevin Mitnick, the first hacker ever on the FBI’s most-wanted list, learned his trade on the demo models at RadioShack because he couldn’t afford a computer of his own. John Draper, the phone phreaker known as “Captain Crunch,” hacked his way into free long-distance calls using a Touch Tone dialer he bought from RadioShack.

Woz bought one too, and he says it cost him a fortune. He used it for the now-infamous Blue Box, which he and Steve Jobs used to make their own free calls without interference from Ma Bell. Without RadioShack, there’s no Blue Box. And as Woz tells it, without the Blue Box there’s no Apple.

I'm sad to see Radio Shack so far from the "builders" market.

I had to run to RS this weekend to try to find a part, only to find 3 salespeople who had no idea of how components or soldering worked. They seemed amazed that I would actually design my own circuits, while I look at what I am doing and consider it to be a bit amateurish. :(

You could move to Berkeley, where we still have Al Lasher's Electronics right in downtown with knowledgeable staff.

I'm @ Notre Dame. I have to use Amazon and eBay. :)

The main problem is that, if the staff know about how to design circuits, why are they working at an electronics store?

Commission? Or maybe it's just a hobby?

I can't imagine there's much commission to be made selling a Raspberry Pi :)

There are lots and lots of knowledgeable people who are also very, very bad at the self-promotion that's necessary to get high-paying jobs in "industry".

Unfortunately that's the only component shop in town. IIRC I couldn't even find one in SF to my amazement.

Kudos to Al Lasher's though, there's few places like that still around.

I think the remaining ones are just cell phone and battery kiosks that happen to be full sized stores.

Up until a couple years ago, the two near me had full sections dedicated to discrete components, arduinos, etc. The old school Radio Shacks had all that stuff for decades until the internet killed them. Now its just a retail junk store.

> They seemed amazed that I would actually design my own circuits

Well, you're dealing with people with retail jobs. They probably aren't meeting a lot of engineers or makers. They spend their days arguing with housewives and children over cell phone contracts and fees.

Standard General bought Radio Shack and it's assets and has been working with moving Sprint into some of the stores (like the one here in Santa Cruz).

http://www.businessinsider.com/standard-general-buys-radiosh...

At least locally, we have Santa Cruz Electronics which has a decent assortment of components. It is no Quement's, etc. though from back in the day.

In Canada, Bell purchased Radio Shack and rebranded it. It has pretty aggressive cell phone upselling, and we missed out on the arduino/makerspace stuff that the US Radio Shack was embarking on a few years ago.

They seemed amazed that I would actually design my own circuits

That shouldn't surprise you, RS employees have never had electronics knowledge. I forget the details, but as one example I remember a conversation while trying to get a replacement battery for a cordless phone for a friend of my girlfriend at the time (who is now my wife, meaning it was well over 20 years ago). Again, forget the details, but employee argued that it couldn't be the battery because "blah blah blah". It holds a charge for 34.6 seconds after charging it overnight and then has about 0.2V, what do you think the problem might be, oh Electronics Wizard?

Back when employees would at least try to pretend to be knowledgable, they'd argue with you if you made the mistake of letting them know what you're building. "You're building a FooBar? No, no, you need a WhatsaHoosit." You mean this article from a guy who forgets more about electronics than you and I will ever know is wrong?

EDIT: that said, when I went to buy some resistors a few weeks ago to fake a display on our headless Mac OS build server, a couple of bucks got me a card of five of them. So I don't know what is missing from supplying the "builders" market.

> So I don't know what is missing from supplying the "builders" market.

It's an extremely small selection, compared to what it was in the early 90's (that I remember - and I remember older folks complaining about how far it had gone down hill even then).

There just is no store I can wander around these days (or series of stores) where I can visualize exactly what I need to build some project. For example I needed recently to put some electronics in a waterproof outdoor box, and cable it up nice with proper waterproof conduit.

For someone who has done that sort of thing 500 times for work, you know exactly what to order and what everything is called and how it will fit. For someone who never has I really miss just being able to go to a hobby/electronics store and actually see the components I'd need to put something together - usually modifying my plans in the process as I see what is available I never knew existed before.

This makes "making things" really hard for the beginner and removes a ton of spontaneous "lets just figure it out and get it done" type of projects - at least for me. There is no store to run back to to swap out that $1.50 component I bought the wrong part number of. Minutes/hours of latency to days at best.

One way to get around this is to buy bulk assorted components off aliexpress or eBay. The prices are better than they've ever been, but yeah, time lag in supply chain (1 month or so) really sucks.

Beware, some of that stuff is extremely sketchy. Stuff that you used to take for granted, like ceramic capacitors, are being mismarked or poorly made now. What good is an assortment of X7R grade caps anyway, even if they are not out of spec?

The crap RadioShack sells is no less sketchy, believe me. I don't buy caps from RS anymore specifically because they seem to source the worst possible. They just sell crap.

When shack was in its heyday, you needed all of those parts to fix radios, TVs, etc.

Electronics became disposable, TV repair went away, and the radio shack shifted.

I wish that's the direction Fry's Electronics had headed in, rather than be an even crappier version of Best Buy...

Sadly that kind of ecosystem has migrated over to Shenzhen.

After the Arduino had come out, and amateur projects were coming out from that, I visited a small hobby electronics store, looking to gather some information, buy some starter gear, and get into the hobby.

I chatted with the sales clerk, who was on the younger side, that I should go back to school for electrical engineering, because that's the only way I'd learn the hobby. I bought an Arduino afterwards, but never used it. That encounter effectively killed it for me.

Not only was that sales clerk bad at his job (discouraging you from pursuing something that you're already interested in), but he was also very wrong.

I'm an electrical engineer who develops hardware similar to the Arduino for a living. I'm still constantly amazed by the things my friends, mostly artists and web designers, make using Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. I remember buying one of the first Arduinos and thinking, "Why did I even go to school? They've made everything so much easier." My friends still ask me questions and help them troubleshoot things; but for the most part, there are tutorials and forums that often provide more information that I can. Sparkfun and Adafruit have a lot of great beginner level tutorials, but they also have some really complex and challenging projects too.

5 for $2? what a rip off, I can buy a complete assortment of values - ~1500 resistors for $5 - you wont go back for resistors for a decade or so

30 seconds found me this: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Hot-New-Arrival-High-Quality-...

I find it interesting that you still thought of RS as a choice. Has there been a RS you could go to for components or soldering stuff any time recently? I haven't seen one that wasn't more than just an electronics store like Best Buy in over a decade if not more.

There was one on Mission St in San Francisco until last year. Expensive but worked in a pinch for basics (through-hole capacitor kits for example).

Never thought I'd see Polycom on HN. Interned for 2 complete years at Polycom, mainly writing internal tools and doing random IT work. I had little oversight and was free to use any framework/language to solve a variety of problems -- I ended up teaching myself a ton of stuff which led to freelance gigs. Lots of cool older engineers, but I got the feeling the culture was dying off.

These things are great devices and very functional. Still, I curse these guys since they enabled people to waste countless hours of my time over the years on ridiculous conference calls that would have been better handled by . . . email.

Oh wait, I hate email too.

But I loved the old Radio Shack. On a tangential note, Tandy Leather Co. took a precipitous dive as well. Where have all the makers gone, whether of circuits or leather things?

Maybe you just hate how people communicate regardless of medium?

The book shown in the article was authored by Robert G. Middleton.

Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000IDA7ZC/

>> Working from those insights, we built our first physical model in a single weekend using plastic panels from the hobby shop, hot glue, and an off-the-shelf paper-cone speaker.

Who needs a 3D printer?

In the early nineties they didn't have one.

we have an original polycom soundstation on our conference table. it still works fine.

I love my Polycom Soundstation.

I only wish I could figure out how to get SSL certs properly loaded onto the phone. Spent multiple hours trying with no success. =(

Took me a while to see where the article was going, and was plenty surprised to see...that thing...the conference room speakerphone that was, in my experience, somewhere between barely functional and purposefully infuriating. I do not have a high opinion of the product after using it. Much like Bose. Hooray for making a lot of money, Monster Cables & Beats headphones style though.

By that measure, lots of successful companies have been founded with information from the internet. If said information was obtained from the public library, was the initial investment ~$0?

"[book] gave us the secret ... sealed enclosure created two separate acoustic environments ... one inside the speaker enclosure ... and one outside, where the microphones were"

I would have thought that part of the design would have been self-evident?

As a TRS-80 owner starting in 1979 I also morn the loss of the inventor/creator version of Radio Shack - hung out there often walking back from school and many started learning BASIC programming (which at the time included hand-assembling Z-80 code in read/data statements and POKEing them in) in the store.

There are a lot of speaker designs. To begin with: how much power do you have available? If you need to depend on the power from the phone line, you need a very efficient speaker -- a horn design, most likely. If you have an external power source, you get a better amplifier, and you can use a less efficient dynamic speaker. What do you put it in? You can leave it unsealed; you can port it carefully; you can seal it in a box -- but what size box?

Turns out that the characteristics of the speaker and the size of the box together determine the performance of the speaker.

They weren't using the POTS line for power (though I remember holding the leads when a ring signal came in - quite a shock! - seemed like the NYC local-loops must have had a RI# of about 20 at the time...) -- and they weren't just building a speaker - they were building a speaker in the same enclosure as microphones, so physical isolation seems like it would be top on the list. (Though even that would have only helped with freqs <= a few hundred Hz, so their active cancellation would still be key...) No big deal - it just "seems" obvious, but I wasn't there...

And, if they did hang out at Radio Shack, they would have come across the venerable Minimus-7 - one of the first examples ever of a high-performing micro speaker with a sealed-enclosure design, that still stands up to the test of time.

http://www.retrothing.com/2011/06/minimus-speaker.html

> the design would have been self-evident > it just "seems" obvious

I really don't understand what these comments bring to this discussion, or any discussion. Evidently, you were not there, and a person who was is telling us the story. Your opinion that the past facts don't align with your expectations is not relevant.

If that's your opinion, then certainly your tertiary meta-comment adds even less value. I think it's truly interesting and worth looking at when, post-hoc, something seems like it should have been obvious, but was not. This can include, among many things, over-saturation of micro-problems in a small domain or slice of the problem limiting "out of the box" thinking on the creation side of things, or misunderstanding of the history and motivations of the creators on my side of things. I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge it may be the latter - but one also must acknowledge that a sub-enclosure for the speaker, whether to enhance the performance of the driver or help isolate the microphones (though I could be over-estimating the benefit of this) "seems" obvious. This does not detract from the story, which I like for many reasons, or the more important fact that a successful business was built, which takes a suite of skills and much fortitude.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com