| From: Stewart C. Russell via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | Losing Active Surplus a few years back was bad, but this one seems worse: | long-established electronic surplus/weird stuff/junk store Above All | Electronic Surplus (635 Bloor W, at Euclid) is closed.
I blame me, and people like me. We stopped giving them enough business. I used to love Active. I'd go on regular fishing trips there. And the place around the corner on Beverley. Starting in the mid 1970s. We introduced our kids to the place in the late 1980s. Active had a connected store with surplus machine shop equipment. It used to be that electronic stuff was expensive. Repair was possible. It seemed worth gleaning old parts. But eventually, new electronics got inexpensive, complex, and hard to hack. Active got a new lease on life selling to OCAD folks. My daughter reminds me that there was a perennial bin labelled "red things". Lots of acrylic sheets. Second world haemostats and the like. Weird optical devices (military range-finders?). Pixelboards from the TTC. Now about the gorilla. I first saw it in Kitchener, at a somehow related surplus store. I don't know if there were two, or, if one, which store had it first. I can't quite remember, but I think that I bought my 64k RAM board for my Altair at the Kitchener store. It would only work if I installed it just so: I think that it was a clone of a mainstream board, and in cloning it, they had shrunk the board end-to-end by about the width of half a trace on the connector. It can think of a variety of reasons that active might have died: - fewer local manufacturers and hence less surplus - Queen St. real estate got quite valuable - owners got older I went to its last day on Queen and bought a few things that I still use. I have still have an orange price tag that I transplanted to my notebook. Above All was better in a number of ways. But none of them drew me. I visited a few times but bought almost nothing. I came out with a good serving of nostalgia. If I really need an oddball old part, there are lots of internet vendors. After I consider the excessive scrap I already have, kept "just in case". --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk