Another Silicon Valley institution died spring of 2019: Halted/HSC

There is still Anchor Electronics (https://anchor-electronics.com/). Not directly comparable, much smaller, but better sorted. There too one might still get a power transistor not manufactured in thirty years ...

McMaster-Carr not meeting your needs?

I've used supplyhouse.com for years for plumbing projects around the house. I'm in New England, so get most items next day if I order by 3 PM (later in metro NY area) and I think I've gotten only one item wrong across hundreds of items and dozens of orders. On a lot of items, they're cheaper than Home Depot as well.

Yep. Also RIP Radio Shack, JDR Microdevices, Weird Stuff, NCA Peripherals, Fry's Electronics (and Fry's drugstore / groceries), and Egghead Software. Even the retail hypermart CompUSA died, leaving only their nemesis, Best Buy.

Micro Center and Central Computer (CCS) endure. The latter stocked those phonebook-thick computer advertisement magazines and Linux on CDs.

I'm reduced to crapshooting Aliexpress and eBay with occasional purchases from Mouser and Digikey via findchips and octopart.

The electronics supply chain just doesn't exist as made in America anymore in volume. Meanwhile, the best place for hardware is usually Shenzhen. Offshoring engineering and manufacturing, declines in EE and skilled workers are the limiting factors. Perhaps there ought to be a 300% tariff placed on goods designed or made not in the US with <75% domestic labor or <75% domestic parts.

Mendelsons in Dayton was another treasure trove of anything random they thought might eventually sell. Closed in 2020.

Yep. Blame Apple for autocorrection. There are scant few b&m places to explore or source things physically. There's no Radio Shack, Tandy, or HeathKit in the b&m form factor.

Maybe electronics needs a dedicated museum? Somewhere that has ISA 16-bit prototype boards and zillions of examples of ICs, vacuum tubes, connectors, passives, datasheets, and accouterment as a historical "seed vault".

What we lack today is a way to move surplus out of startups and back in to new places. HSC wasn’t just a place to buy stuff, it was also a place to dump excess parts stock. It was part of a cycle of goods that led to better utilization and less waste of valuable materials. And this meant good deals too, so young people like myself 20 years ago could buy some pretty cool stuff for low prices. It was a place of ideation, where you never knew what you were going to find, and those random gizmos sometimes provided a spark of an idea for a new approach to a problem you had been mulling over. It was a place to bump in to other weirdos and talk about projects, learn new things, and make new connections. It was a place where you would walk in and buy one red LED and one resistor for 35 cents, instead of every single pack of items on Amazon containing 100 pieces you will never use and setting you back $10 here and $10 there. It was a place where I learned I could get in to amateur radio really easily if I wanted. And they had one hell of a vacuum tube collection.

It was only accessible to people who lived nearby and that’s a down side for the people who didn’t, but if you worked or lived ten minutes away like I did from college and on for another ten years as I studied robotics and built up my career, it was far and away better than Amazon in almost every way.

Today I rode my bike to Sudo Room in Oakland and picked up three SOT-23 N Channel Mosfets and a couple of 5 amp toggle switches for a fun little project I am working on. There’s bins of switches, caps, wires, motors, power supplies, cables, and who knows what else. It’s all free to members in good standing. Last year my TV died because of bad capacitors. I ordered a capacitor kit for it from Amazon for $15 which actually was missing some important values. I rode my bike to Sudo room and got what I needed for free. I never should have bought the Amazon kit.

There’s a lot to these places where people gather, offer up surplus parts, and take what they need for free when they need it. There’s no packaging waste. There’s no workers pushed so hard they have to pee in bottles to get you a $10 100 pack of red LEDs when all you need is one. Less stuff gets sent to landfill, which means less carbon emissions and environmental damage. It’s like a library instead of a book store. There’s a lot of value there.

For those that no longer have access to places like this, what we have now is really much worse in so many ways.

While I agree with you in principle, sometimes you actually don't know what you want until you see it on the shelf. HSC had that magic... I would see stuff and suddenly whole projects would form around it in my head. And the prices were such that you could afford to make it happen.

This will sound mundane, but I remember back in college, I was working on a solar water heater competition project with a budget of something like $200. We'd decided on copper pipes and a metal solar collector spray painted black, but the trouble was making a good thermal connection between the two.

Up until that point, I didn't even realize that solder bars (think solder ingots) existed until I saw them on the shelf for $3 each.

Following on from my story elsewhere about working for HGST (Western Digital), visiting HQ in San Jose from the UK and making it to Halted a couple of times...

...then WD acquired Sandisk and I found myself in Utah for tech training, and made a trip to Raelco.

Boy was that place a tight squeeze to navigate!

Halted was an electronics surplus store. A really good one. They had old tubes, old ICs, stuff left over from Atari. They had aisles of capacitors, some with date codes in the mid '80s, and newer surface mount stuff. They had a whole wall of 1/4 W resistors at two cents a piece. They had all kinds of random parts for keeping old electronics running, and making new stuff. And they had a receipt for an oscilloscope they sold in the '60s to some kid in Palo Alto named Steve Jobs.

Unfortunately, the owner retired and sold it off for parts.

The most incredible wonderland for anyone doing electronics. You could spend days digging in there and always find something new and bizzare. Best part was that the building was practically a Faraday cage and there was no cell reception to help you identify what you were looking at.

I bought an old ADF there (cheap avionics), great vacuum florescent displays, tubes, reels of SMD parts I still have, PIC microcontrollers for unreasonably good prices, and bags and bags of other old parts. The back wall of the office area was entirely lined with Halicrafters S-38 longwave radios.

Back in the 80's I used to know how to get to half the surplus electronics places in the valley by heart.

One of the things about it was there wasn't an internet. Everything was paper catalogs. Even if you had them they didn't have prices. Just being able to browse and see all the things that existed was a big leg up. And being able to buy small quantities of stuff for a project.

JDR Micro devices was just down the street on Bascom ave.

Catalog from 1994.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/284858796977

Told all my Michigan friends when they visited the Bay area to be sure to visit Frys, Weird Stuff and Computer Literacy Bookstore.

Saddest about Fry's, when I worked for a hosting company we had a data center in Virginia. The boss would drive out there with servers from Michigan to rack and on the way back he'd go hundreds of miles out of his way just to stop at Fry's in Indianapolis.

I bumped into this ageing hippy (grey hair, cheesecloth shirt, pony tail, shorts and sandals), in Frys (East Brokaw Road) during one of my trips from the UK to the USA.

He was a really nice guy and wanted help choosing some kind of adapter for his mac laptop.

We got chatting about why I was in San Jose, Western Digital being in the old IBM buildings, what I did for work etc., and then he mentioned that he was one of the early day SV computer crew and hung out with other members of the The Homebrew Computer Club. He also said his brother played Spanish guitar at a restaurant in Mountain View and recommended the food!

He finished off with "...yeah, I knew Steve Jobs quite well - boy, he could be a dick at times!"

I think the archaeology was part of the problem. Through its last days there was a lot of, well, garbage that absolutely nobody would be interested in. Like iPhone 3GS cases c.a. 2018 - who's gonna buy that?

Silicon Valley also got really expensive. Akihabara has always been, eh, not the highest rent place. Like Silicon Valley used to be like that.

I've seen discussion that it really boils down to tax/rent combination that allows small places to survive on lower income, while the bigger places that would normally muscle then it would have to pay much more.

But we would need a local expert to verify

NYC Canal Street was similar to Akihabara 45+ years ago, for electronics? When did that change? 80s financial boom?

Greater Tokyo has a population of over 40 million, which is greater than that of all of California (38 million), let alone the SJ-SF-OAK CSA (9.7 million).

Economists since at least Adam Smith have noted that larger cities and regions can support a more complex and richer economic system.

One of California's problems is that rising real estate values and rents are both pricing out more activities (and people), and increasing costs of business: higher rents -> higher wages, the bulk of which are paid to landlords or mortgage lenders.

I suppose you could say 40 years ago London had Tottenham Court Road full of little electronics shops, the rest of the UK had at least all their local Maplins, all of Germany was plastered with Conrad Electronics, plenty of car boot sales for vac tubes, military spare optics (man, Russia-made stuff in 1990 - great optical quality, built to not just survive a nuclear strike but to be used for yhr counterstrike ... sold for a song), and so on. Nevermind the cornershops for electronic spare parts. Beijing had its block of electronics shops somewhere near Tsinghua University 20 years ago when I was there selling questionable CPUs to retail by the tray (half of them ceramic blanks).

I'm not sure why and when exactly things have changed, but it looks that between pihut and amazon, not much "toyz" were left. I must admit though that the web has made it easier to learn/work alone; you used to go somewhere that taught you how to solder, somewhere that told you resistor color coding, tra nsistor number meanings, yadayada - now you watch it on youtube. The social aspect is gone; even makerspaces are often "just" the 3D printing and woodworking crowds, with little electonics.

It's worldwide. If it hasn't quite reached Japan yet, it will soon enough.