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.
The bay area is a place of transformation - grassland became orchards, became early silicon valley, became the micro-computer revolution - and so on - one of the few constants in California is change.
I used to see a guy harvesting wheat next to Intel's fab, or walk through the bean fields where Google HQ (before Google, SGI's and Alza's respective HQs). Oh yeah, and I remember when all the houses in Palo Alto were underwater (prices had fallen so low the houses were worth less thant their mortgages).
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.
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."
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.
I had the honor of seeing one of my designs at the De Anza electronics flea market before it was even in production. Turns out it had been stolen from the shipping and receiving area.
Their original location was a little ways across the Lawrence Expressway from the original Fry's, which was near the original Computer Literacy Bookstore, which was in the same small shopping center as a Togo's.
That made for a perfect nerd resupply run plus lunch trip.
"The market opens around 5:00am and closes at 12:00 Noon."
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...
It is an interesting testament to how Silicon Valley has changed over the last couple of decades.
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).
This is the best thing I've read about the closing of WSW, because it helps me put the entire situation in perspective. I'm as sad as ever about it all, but considering it in the context of the entire arc of the Silicon Valley story is comforting in some way. Wistful, but at least it's satisfying.
Maybe it's time to consider moving to Shenzhen. There certainly does seem to be a thriving maker and hacker community there.
I've been putting together a better lab and it's pretty tough. On eBay, most sellers are very optimistic about their prices, making it a bit tough to put together a lab as a student. There are few resellers like WeirdStuff around, and most e-waste gets shipped off to somewhere with laxer environmental regulations.
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.
A lot of the inventor tinker stuff has moved to other countries. I mean, you see children build solar power plants for the watering cleaning system and micro farms that they’ve also build in Africa.
pre internet I remember driving to Stevens Creek Boulevard from San Francisco for all the Indian pc stores, and visiting Frys and weirdstuff and other places I knew the location of and what they sold but didn't know the name. These days everything is online and apart from places like Jameco - which are online too - physical retail locations in the valley are very last century. Very sad to see WeirdStuff go though...
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.
A long time ago I bought a serial terminal and a whole bunch of serial cables from them. Along with a Cisco PIX. I still have all of that somewhere in my garage.
For those missing Weird Stuff, who haven't been to Halted Electronics, I highly recommend paying their warehouse in Santa Clara a visit. Big warehouse chock full of surplus goods.
Take your kids there if you have 'em, and while they still exist. I have many fond memories of afternoons spent in these places.
The impression I got is that Halted really prices stuff up to about the maximum of what they can get away with. But still, I do appreciate them existing.
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.
I was lucky enough to get to go to weirdstuff a few times over the past year, and it’s sad to see it go. I have witnessed the fall of surplus stores over the last decade or so. It seems like they lost touch with what hobbyists want. You’d see piles of corporate IP phones, which no one would find interesting. Piles of rackmount servers for way too much. Piles of hard drives from 1988 that almost certainly won’t hold data. It was bleak. Meanwhile, hobbyist electronics is thriving. Arduinos are flying off the shelves at Amazon.
I saw pictures of Core2-Xeon era servers - did they have newer stuff by the end? I figure most of the secondary demand is for at least Nehalem by now, probably Sandy Bridge+.
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 had so much fun digging through there in the late 90s. We got an SGI Onyx from there for a couple hundred bucks and turned it into a liquor cabinet. So much unique stuff you never knew existed there. Really the most appropriately named store. Disappointing. :(
At some point, we're gonna have to stop pretending "Silicon Valley" is still built on silicon and come up with another name for the place. (Maybe, "Private Surveillance Valley".)
Fun place, I remember getting hard-to-find power supplies around the end of the 80's for the robots I used to support.
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...
Not the same, but equally weird: American Science and Surplus (https://www.sciplus.com). Their focus is split between educational toys and surplus scientific and electronic equipment and components. It's a good place to shop for robot parts.
I visited Weirdstuff earlier this year looking for parts to mount a vertical PDU. I found spare 45U l-brackets and a u-bracket I'm pretty sure was designed for the problem I was solving--I'll miss digging through part bins and wandering down the aisles.
Who remembers Mike Quinn (Mike passed away) in Oakland, or JDR Microdevices in San Jose (is Jeff from Cleveland still alive, his mother's account number was 1,000,000 BTW), or the fleamarket at ACP (Advanced Computer Products)in Santa Ana, Tom and Dave Freeman - do they still live?
The scrap yard at Space Age Metal Products - (the Kleins, now morphed into Classic Components) ...
when I would come out for business in the late 80's at Sun I would always stop at 3 places: Computer Literacy, Fry's and Weird Stuff Warehouse. WSW back then sold even more exotic hardware as the minicomputer era was running down. Nothing like finding VAX parts or even an RK05 disk drive. yes, everything changes but not always for the better, I will miss them.
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Aloha|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gumby|8 years ago|reply
Times change.
[+] [-] mark-r|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MarkSweep|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitwize|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DrScump|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] erkose|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saagarjha|8 years ago|reply
Yeah, it was kind of disappointing that they replaced it with a Starbucks of all things…
[+] [-] huhtenberg|8 years ago|reply
This is not a sadness per se, it's the by-the-book nostalgia.
[+] [-] dangrossman|8 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] shard972|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hansenq|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StillBored|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] philfrasty|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kabdib|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhpankow|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|8 years ago|reply
That made for a perfect nerd resupply run plus lunch trip.
[+] [-] DrScump|8 years ago|reply
And that same building housed Ham Radio Outlet for decades.
[+] [-] sp_nster|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AceJohnny2|8 years ago|reply
https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2018/electronics-flea-marke...
[+] [-] russellbeattie|8 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|8 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] jaysonelliot|8 years ago|reply
Maybe it's time to consider moving to Shenzhen. There certainly does seem to be a thriving maker and hacker community there.
[+] [-] Hasz|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eksemplar|8 years ago|reply
I’m sure things are even weirder in Asia.
[+] [-] olivermarks|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tramGG|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dogman-special|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bifrost|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aperrien|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] asteli|8 years ago|reply
Take your kids there if you have 'em, and while they still exist. I have many fond memories of afternoons spent in these places.
[+] [-] natch|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] emh68|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] happycube|8 years ago|reply
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 ;)
[+] [-] VectorLock|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SwellJoe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeterMikhailov|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] packetslave|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] raintrees|8 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] cardamomo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alanpost|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdblair|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calebio|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bittercynic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uxp100|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Firerouge|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aurizon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itworker7|8 years ago|reply