The rise, fall, and rise of electronics kits

Many older engineers first became interested in electronics through hobbies in their youth-assembling kits, participating in amateur radio, or engaging in other experiments. But I have wondered whether or not students entering engineering today had the benefit of similar experience. . The 1970s and 1980s were great times for electronics hobbyists. Heathkits were hot items, often newer and of better quality than commercial equivalents, featuring the latest hi-fi stereo equipment, for example. I remember poring over the catalog and rationalizing why I had to buy the newest widget. There were two memorable moments associated with each Heathkit-opening the packaged kit, and finally turning on the finished product. In between was kind of messy, but I thought that the world would always be like that: soldering individual components and connecting wires onto circuit boards. · It wasn´t to be. Electronics was in a state of rapid transition. Integrated circuits were displacing many individual components, and surface-mount assembly was moving beyond hobbyist capability. Moreover, automated assembly meant commercial products could be manufactured for less than packaging an equivalent kit. By the early 1990s, Heathkit was out of business. . But integrated circuits begat microprocessors, and a new era of hobby electronics began. The Altair computer captured the fascination of many, who now could design and build their own computers. Soon, though, commercial home computers hit the market and lessened the incentives for building your own from scratch. For some years thereafter hobbyists contented themselves mostly with buying board-level components to customize their machines. Nonetheless, it was a heady time, and computer fairs blossomed.