Since #electronics have been on my mind lately, I've been thinking of this ... story? situation? anecdote might be the best fit.
Doing anything every vaguely #niche, like #hobby electronics, in a small #city in the middle of #nowhere used to be quite difficult in terms of obtaining #supplies and #parts. Before the #internet, if you could plan ahead and order enough stuff at once from a big #distributor to make the #shipping charges worthwhile, #catalogs from DigiKey etc were life savers.
For example, in my last semester at #school, when we had to synthesize all the various things we'd learned in our years in our program and create a final-term #project - designing a #circuit, #manufacturing the #PCB, turning that into a working #device, writing the #software to control it, 3 different kinds of #documentation for the whole #system - we actually spent basically a whole year preparing.
I organized half a dozen of my classmates to bulk-buy #parts from #DigiKey.
We were poor students. Electronics were still quite #expensive (it's a long time ago ... mumblety-five years or more...). I needed #transistors and 10W power #resistors and 1/4W resistors and #diodes and I don't know what else, and most of them besides the 1/4W resistors were a dollar or more each. Even plain resistors were 20 or 30 cents.
By splitting the shipping charge between us and buying common parts so we got the #price#break at 10, or 100, or whatever units, we saved a bunch.
Some of our #projects would probably have been too expensive to do if we'd been stuck with buying parts #locally.
(This is finally tying back to my opening comments...)
This city had exactly 2 local #suppliers open to the public at the time. One, Radio Supply, was locally owned. Their prices weren't too bad, but they didn't #stock everything and didn't really do the special-order thing. If what you wanted was common and used in trade, you would be okay.
The other place was a branch of a #regional#chain that served most of western #Canada. They used to have branches in 7 or 8 cities throughout the #west. They still exist, but they only have a head office in #Calgary and a branch in #Saskatoon now.
Back in the day, my friends and I had a name for them. We called it "Two weeks, ten bucks". "Hey, I gotta go to two weeks, ten bucks on Thursday when I get off work. Do you need anything?"
It didn't matter what you needed, they didn't have it in stock. It would take two weeks to order it in.
And it didn't matter how small it was, it was going to #cost ten bucks. I think that may have been a #minimum price for anything not in-stock, but I don't recall for sure.
A replacement reservoir cap for that radio? Two weeks, ten bucks.
A ceramic fuse of a particular value? Two weeks, ten bucks.
A transistor for your project? Two weeks, ten bucks.
Keep in mind that #minimum#wage at the time was less than five bucks an hour. And of course as poor students, all the jobs we could work were minimum wage. It would be like trying to build your project today with transistors that cost $30. Each.
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