Re: History of bulk electronic components suppliers
- From: et472@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Michael Black)
- Date: 11 Feb 2007 15:33:10 GMT
Mark Aitchison (MarkA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) writes:
Hi,
purely out of curiosity, is there anyone who can tell me what happened
to popular electronics mail-order companies of the 1970s like Poly Paks
in the US and BiPak & BiPrePak in the UK? There must have been a trend
that killed them off, and caused other medium sized names to shrink
while a few grew very large? Is there a book on this element of history??
Mark A
It's easy to see a trend after the fact, but a reality is that even long
standing businesses can go under. There have been some long existing chains
here in Canada that went out of business in the past decade or so, and the
immediate reaction is "but they've been there forever, how can it be...".
The fact that the businesses had been around for a long time does not
mean they are impervious to all the problems businesses have, it just
makes it a lot more noticeable.
Poly-Paks just sort of faded out. Unlike a lot of things, I can't recall
any exact time when it disappeared. I suspect their prime had peaked before
they actually closed down.
A lot of their stuff was surplus. They started out in the early sixties,
at a time when semiconductors were still relatively new, and so they
were supplying things that the old-line stores weren't, and maybe doing
it at a better price than a lot of places that did sell the parts (because
they were selling surplus). But later, other outlets had come along to
sell to hobbyists, either old-style stores adapting or new places starting
up, and they were generally better than Poly-Paks. They had a wider range,
their prices were good, and they weren't selling things of dubious origins.
Say post-1975, there were other places to buy that sort of thing, but the
other places had everything you'd need. Poly-Paks hadn't changed much,
including their ads, and while you could get an 8080 from them by
that point (though I can't remember if they had a better price on them
or not), they didn't have all the peripheral ICs or even TTL to put
together a computer. ANd as digital logic took over in a lot of things,
the projects got more complicated. So while being able to get a transistor
in the early sixties might have been neat, or get a PLL IC in the early
seventies because you wanted to play around with them for their own sake,
as the projects got more complicated the "neat IC" was a lesser part of
it all, and my recollection is that Poly-Paks couldn't supply it all.
Their closing down might have been a result of this, or it might have
been a result of overbuying something and getting stuck with too much
stock and not enough cash, like any business has to be concerned with.
Or maybe an owner died, and nobody wanted to take over. I don't know,
but there are lots of factors that could have been the issue that
had nothing to do with a "trend".
Michael
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