Weirdstuff Warehouse is closed
weirdstuff.com
weirdstuff.com
I came to the valley (no, the other one, up north) back around 1995. And Weird Stuff was absolutely one of the things that made it "Silicon" valley.
Back when I would BBS from Kansas and pore over text files listing BBS's I was green with envy at all the boards in Sunnyvale, Mountain View....
Coming out here was everything I had imagined when I walked into Fry's, Weird Stuff, Disk Drive Depot, The Computer Literacy Bookstore, Haltek Electronics....
Slowly though the hardware Mecca that was the valley gave way to the internet titans and software as Yahoo, Google, etc. appeared.
Fry's started selling T.V.s mainly.
The Saturday morning electronics surplus crawl that used to include a half-dozen stops became just HSC....
Weird Stuff moved out near the Sunnyvale dump.
The pizza dive on Steven's Creek that Woz loved became Pizza and Noodles, then just Falafels.
Vivi's is gone.
When the Donut Wheel closes shop it will be time for me to move on.
Unless it is property taxes.
Now if the parent poster had said housing stock has remained (generally) constant, I'd be in agreement on that.
I think salaries have increased dramatically since that time frame, creating the perception of relative affordability for previous years. I think the % of home price increase has been fairly constant (except for the market crash).
Who knows what may happen in 10 more years! Home prices may still yet double, but then entry level SE positions may be going for 400-500k!
It's a footgun. Methods of government vary in how many wise people you need for good decisions. For example an autocracy can work well with just one wise person, so long as they're the autocrat. Under Direct Democracy, more than half of all people need to _agree_ on a decision so you're going to need fully half your people to be wise or the outcomes will be awful. Good luck with that.
I guess you can see how this is more of a foot canon...
Representative democracy does that too, as is evident from watching. Congress.
And non-democratic systems tend to end up with the ruling class deciding “We should get $x, And everybody else should be taxed to pay for it”, which while more fiscally coherent, isn't actually better from the perspective of anyone outside the ruling class.
> For example an autocracy can work well with just one wise person, so long as they're the autocrat.
And as long as they are not only wise, but unusually deficient in drive to serve their own self-interest. Unfortunately, it turns out that it's fairly hard to find people with the latter quality a d assure they become the autocrat; democracies, rather than relying on electors avoiding serving their self interest, rely on them actively striving to, which turns out is much more common.
As rents rise beyond oppressive rates, I worry the Bay Area won't be as innovative anymore because startups (software and hardware) won't be able to afford taking risks.
This is true. Look at any of the 70's and 80's computer magazines on archive.org, and you'll see only about 20% of the ads are from companies in SV. All the others are scattered in cities big and small from coast to coast.
It's amazing to think that small towns in Illinois and rural Virginia used to have big players in the hardware industry.
Now, with the exception of the increasingly rare spark from Apple, it's not about building innovative and interesting physical things anymore. It's about taking other people's money and shuffling it around trying to make more of it through half-baked startup ideas. Silicon Valley is just banking in slow motion.
It was a cool computer too — to this day their super action controllers are my favorite game controller.
Unfortunately, many of my computers came from that OTHER leather turned electronics company -- Tandy.
What was the last thing Apple made that wasn't just a marginally polished version of someone else's invention?
That's not really a knock on Apple; they've been very successful jumping in to proven markets with incredibly polished versions of existing products. But I agree it's been a long while since they've done anything as innovative as their early days. They got a nice injection of innovation when they brought back Jobs's other company, NeXT, including the foundation of all their current operating systems. But even that stuff is almost 30 years old.
For Apple, there’s lots of innovation in the way they create hardware at scale with previously unheard of tolerances. For example, when they thought “let’s make a laptop chassis from milled aliminium” they couldn’t just send the design out to a company used to making millions of milled aluminum bodies of that size.
Apple also innovated by bringing 64-bit CPUs to mobile phones (not a surprising innovation, but they managed to do it earlier than many people suspected were possible)
I had a Sony Ericsson P-800 when the iPhone was launched. It was the first smartphone that didn't look like something out of Star Trek (and I mean it in a bad way). When you compare an iPhone with my P-800, it looks like the iPhone is something that actually came from the future.
It's not. It's more like they invented the first usable smartphone and the MP3 player everyone would want to have.
There is a parallel with the Apple II here - it was one of the very first personal computers that was approachable, self-contained (with a real keyboard built-in), booted from a ROM with an easy to use programming language, could display color, output sound, and had expansion slots that were usually hidden under a beige cover. Apple didn't invent the personal computer - they only made one of the first ones people would actually want to use.
Their use of solid-state storage on the MacBook Air family enabled ultra-thin laptops others copied later on. Backlit keyboards (debuted in the Titanium Powerbooks). It seems everyone else just makes marginally cheaper versions of things Apple did first.
Search the patent database.
Just because some yearn for something in a area does not mean they want to live in the area.
Personally I yearn for programming meetups, but everytime I look in my area all is PHP/webdev based; or a hour drive to a major city.
All because I want to live close to my family, friends and speak my mother tongue.
Instead two of the most dominant companies fund themselves with ad revenue or selling private information.
Apple does hardware, but it’s a closed box.
Zhongguancun in Beijing used to have a lot of emalls, but they’ve been retreating over time as all this stuff moves online.
Akihabara jumped the shark almost ten years ago. Now it's mostly a legend fueled by internet wanna-be otaku who have never been to, and never will go to Japan.
I remember exploring the impossibly narrow vertical electronics stores of Akihabara in the late 80's and early 90's and you never knew what you might find.
I still stop by a couple of times a year, but these days it's just a place to find iPhone accessories and old parts for restoring vintage PC clones.
When the iPhone became the #1 phone in Japan, it was over. Just about the only interesting thing about Aki these days is the maid cafes. Everything else is tourist cosplay junk.
You're not going to get a deal on common consumer electronics like a camera or video games, but even still its pretty rare that there is a place where you can go and see nearly any consumer electronic you could possibly want in person.
Sorry but that is not a good summary. Only a small part of akihabara is built for tourist. And how is maid cafe the only interesting thing?
http://www.12hk.com/area/ShamShuiPo/GoldenShoppingArcade.sht...
They have some rather interesting parts, too.
https://hackaday.com/2017/04/30/afroman-makes-a-uhf-oscillat...
Times change.
This is not a sadness per se, it's the by-the-book nostalgia.
Nostalgia is a sentimentality for the past,
typically for a period or place with happy
personal associations. Haltek Electronics
I think Donut Wheel may be located on unincorporated land, because it was one of the last places where smoking was legal indoors. It was packed with smokers all the time.
Lou's (San Jose) is long gone, and Stan's was ruined by the people who took it over a few years ago, so Donut Wheel is the only decent donut place around anymore.
Yeah, it was kind of disappointing that they replaced it with a Starbucks of all things…
To Weirdstuff Customers,
Sadly, after 32 years in business, Weirdstuff Warehouse will be closing its doors as of April 9, 2018. If you have been following the real estate news for Sunnyvale you know that Google purchased a large amount of real estate in the area including the building we have been leasing for the past 22 years. We have been asked to vacate the building as soon as possible, and in order to accomplish that task we are selling our inventory and many of our assets to Outback Equipment of Morgan Hill. The transfer of inventory and assets will take place on April 9, 2018; at that time Weirdstuff Warehouse will cease to do business.
Even though Weirdstuff is closing we will retain ownership of the Corporation, trademark, and domain names. We hope to handle these entities and wind down the corporation before year end.
Many of you have been loyal customers for many years, and we have enjoyed working with you. We thank you for your loyalty and business."
You see, the Zip drive had a parked head. When the head came out to read the disk it would "click" as the head left it's dock and came out to the media. If it failed to read the media it would click again as it re-docked. This all happened fairly quickly and was the "click-click" sound you heard when a drive failed for almost any reason.
That proved to be a very difficult problem that ultimately led to the class action suit that I believe was the companies demise. It survived in name for a number of years, but really only in name.
The lawsuit itself didn't seem to affect the company that much but it affected policy a lot. Their next drive could have been the next big craze. It was ready way before compact flash came along but the company refused to ship it because the failure rate was slightly above 1%. We spent a few years trying to reduce the failure rate by fractions and we all know that a few years is ages is technology.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/10/29/1823212/welcome...
In the late 1990's they had a lot of "junk", which a couple of the employees curated into a museum of early computing. Then they moved buildings (from where vans autoparts is to the goodwill complex east of 35). The museum was formalized, but they also instituted some kind of "policy" that apparently went along the lines of "if its not in a black PC case put it in the recycling bin" and the guys running the dropoff/collection promptly "recycled" tons of rare stuff that in many cases could have been sold on ebay for 100x what they were making in the computer store itself (queue story of racing there to retrieve a high end 10 year old sun server only to be told it was in the bottom of a dumpster being shipped off to china/wherever to be "recycled").
So the store itself became worthless since it really only sold 3-4 year old PCs for frequently for more than what could be had on a good day at fry's. It stopped being a place to find parts for older machines, which made it effectively useless.
A couple years ago they closed down the computer museum too. I remember reading that they sent some of the documentation/etc to UT, some of the hardware to other museums and sold the rest of it on ebay or recycled it.
When I went to Computer Works, the guy at the register said to donate at the regular Goodwill next door. I was leery, but OK, it is their shop. I drove around the back, told the guy this was donations for the Computer Works and that everything was organized into groups -- hardware/software specific for a given machine was together. I started unloading my car into piles, and on the third or fourth trip I noticed that the receiving guy completely ignored me and had taken all the printed material and chucked it into a huge bin along with all the other random books and magazines they collected. I just about blew a gasket, but I promised my wife I would get rid of it.
I came back a few times in subsequent months, and it never showed up in the museum, and it never showed up on their "for sale" section. I assume it all got recycled.
That made for a perfect nerd resupply run plus lunch trip.
And that same building housed Ham Radio Outlet for decades.
https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2018/electronics-flea-marke...
WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?? I've yet to make one of these because of it's random timing and, most importantly, the ridiculous time it's open. If I do get lucky and remember, it's usually around 11:45 a.m. on the day of...
They too lost their lease.
Gather under the Woodall Rogers Freeway throughout the night, and into early morning, eat some potato chips, buy some cheapo gear and get on with your project.
I'm astounded we don't have something more like it in the Bay Area.
When I moved to the 'valley of the nerds' in the 80's there were dozens of places where you could buy electronics at "retail" prices, and there were places where companies disposed of electronics they weren't going to use for "scrap" prices. This is where the places like WeirdStuff, Halted, Zacks, Alltronics, and others thrived.
There were many manufacturing companies that did prototype or small run manufacturing. There were companies that started up and closed down. There were labs that were opened, closed, or changed in some way. It lead a bunch of places where used (sometimes lightly and sometimes not so much) gear and parts were bought for pennies on the dollar and sold for nickels on the dollar.
The really cool thing about the "surplus" market was you could walk through isles of stuff where parts that someone payed thousands of dollars to have machined were selling for a few tens of dollars. Chips, like FPGAs, that were $1500 each selling for $5 each. Connectors, switches, transistors, and all sorts of discrete components that sold very cheaply. The good news was it was cheap, the bad news was that when they ran out, they were not getting any more in.
I bought from them, I sold to them, they were the source of many a project which could be built cheaply because you weren't paying full freight.
A number of things have conspired over the last 20 years which changed this world. Of course part of it was that a lot of manufacturing went off shore. Now when someone had to by 50,000 chips to build 45,000 units, the 5,000 they had left over ends up in the stalls at Shenzen not the shelves of a surplus store in the Bay Area. Another factor was that after the turn of the century parts became more specialized and manufacturers more secretive so while a complete data sheet of an Intel video controller was available in their data books, register level access to the NVIDIA or S3 chips was protected by strict nondisclosure agreements. The other change was that as manufacturing moved, the things that supported them moved, calibration labs, certification labs, PCB manufacturing, and assembly. So what was a steady stream of 10 year old test equipment that had been shuffled out of these places because the new stuff could hand the new speeds etc, that started drying up.
The typical experience of walking into one of these shops were aisles and aisles of "stuff" from compoents, to partial assemblies, to full assemblies. I walked into Halted one day and they had three pager transmitters that someone had surplused out. With the three of them you could easily create a single working one with some spares and set up your own private pager network. When the company that made Ricochet modems (an old wireless peer to peer networking systems) went bust not only did their modems show up in the surplus market but so did test equipment for characterizing their power output and frequency spurs. Stuff that an RF lab would pay $50,000 to put together yours for the low low price of $1,500 or so. Sometimes you would come across really cryptic, possibly alien, artifacts. For example there was a stainless steel clamp with a micrometer dial attached to it where a position adjustment would be made. The dial moved freely but it didn't seem to adjust the position of the clamp. I figured it was a manufacturing defect until a friend of mine pointed out the units on the dial was angstroms. We figured out that these were part of a fixture for making optical cables and would help align the fiber and connector in terms of nanometers (a very very small amount). One day we went to the new arrivals table at Weird Stuff and they had a complete seeker head for an AIM-9 sidewinder missile. They were asking $5,000 for it (I offered them something silly like $500). The next week it was gone and I asked if they had sold it, the clerk said no, the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had showed up with the FBI can confiscated it. Apparently it was possible to derive classified information about the missile by looking at the seeker head.
At the turn of the century during the Y2K period hundreds of computers that the manufacturer was unwilling or unable to make Y2K complaint showed up. This included PDP-11's and MicroVAX systems. I ended up with an example of every QBUS based MicroVAX ever sold by DEC. They were kind of like pokemon monsters, at some point you felt you had to have one of each.
These days most of the startups are purely software based. And their infrastructure they rent from Amazon or Google or Microsoft. Those companies have recycle programs that cut out the surplus vendors and usually don't leave anything usable. When a typical Silicon Valley company decides to "sell off their assets" that generally means office chairs, white boards, and the occasional espresso machine. Not test equipment, test fixtures, extra parts, and tools. And it is also true that fewer people are trying to put together an EE lab or RF lab on the cheap, or get their HP^h^hAgilent^h^h^h^h^h^h^hKeysight test equipment calibrated. Chips are either cheap and commodity from places like Digikey, or they are expensive and only obtainable through a mutual NDA with a company.
So the era ends as the long tail stretches into the future. It is sad that folks here won't be able to experience the Silicon Valley that I did but by the same token my version of the valley was different than the semiconductor manufacturing version (60's - 70's).
Maybe it's time to consider moving to Shenzhen. There certainly does seem to be a thriving maker and hacker community there.
The only real way to buy industrial parts and equipment is to live in a big city and attend industrial bankruptcy auctions. Most of the time it's machine tools, but occasionally a prototyping shop will go bust or a local university will do a surplus sale. These are the only real way to get decent gear reliably I've found.
I’m sure things are even weirder in Asia.
I've bought so much stuff here, its one of the only places you could easily find rack shelves that weren't a zillion dollars a piece. Or really any kind of rack mountable gear in the silicon valley. I still have some switches from there.
Take your kids there if you have 'em, and while they still exist. I have many fond memories of afternoons spent in these places.
Someone is inevitably going to say: "Well, they need the prices that high in order to pay costs." But I don't think the person with that line of argument has thought their argument through deeply.
Various things start happening when prices get up to gouge level: inventory starts getting stolen by bitter people who otherwise would have been customers, or inventory simply doesn't move as fast, and customers aren't as happy and tend not to be as supportive. My most recent purchase there was a small glass lens (smaller than a mini Altoids mint... yes, mini, not regular size) and it was an average sized one, not unique, from a random bag of similar sized ones, not any certain spec for any specific purpose, and they got $8 for that. Weird stuff had all their lenses bought up the week before that, go figure.
Weird Stuff, on the other hand, was dirt cheap and very cheerful about everything, and their customers were huge fans, from what I know. Halted... I do still like them, but they sure are grumpy and those prices, sigh.
Still, maybe if Weird Stuff had higher prices (slightly higher... not Halted-level higher, mkay?) they could have survived and moved nearby? I guess we'll never know.
That said, I would've made the trip up if I had word a couple of weeks ahead of time! I love seeing the variety of stuff, even if it's not terribly useful these days ;)
I also remember a client who picked up computer parts that he had to machine/adapt to get to work together, back around 1993, I think. He lamented that they spent more time trying to get stuff to connect (physically and electronically) than actually learning about how computers work (the original intent of the class he took). I am not sure if it was his idea or the instructor's to get parts from WeirdStuff...
* http://anchor-electronics.com
I had ended up with deprecated equipment from Sunnyvale Public Safety (my dad worked there). I had two different models of PowerPC Macs, an external scsi drive, and more cables than a could count, plus some other stuff.
I made several trips to Weird Stuff, so that I could make one usable computer out of the pile. I also learned the dreadful screech that PowerMacs made, when you put the RAM in wrong and turned it on.
I hope they can, at least, ship stuff over here.
I'm sad to see them go.