[HH] Micro Center, Radio Shack

[Greg London]

>> It's funny that despite the resurgence in electronics hobby products, we
>> haven't seen the return of some of the niche retailers like Unitech (an


Well, I'm not sure if there is some sort of underlying tradoff
mechanism at play or if this is completely unrelated, but:

Back in the 80's when visits to RadioShack were awesome,
we were wire wrapping 8080's that would blink LED's,
maybe read a switch, and maybe control a motor.
It was the size of a briefcase and had to be plugged into 120ac.

The stuff that's available today? A smart phone in my pocket
that has GPS, something called the internet, runs games,
has voice recognition, compass, accelerameters, and camera?
All in the palm of my hand and battery powered???

We could only DREAM of something like that when we were
browsing the parts cabinets at RadioShack.

But if you want to design your own smart phone today from scratch,
you're looking at a tech startup company, not some hobby that
starts with a trip to RadioShack. custom ASIC design, creating your
own embedded operating system, yada, yada, yada.

The barrier to entry is a whole lot higher now than it used to be.