Maplin meltdown

Ironically, its quite of the ads that are the most interesting bit of some old mags now... Like looking at just how much a decent V22 bis modem was back in the 80's ;-)

I still have a 1995 one on the shelf for just that reason - one of the last to include full pinouts for many of the ICs they stocked.

Quality of connectors fell then. Products from Altai were made of cheese quality plastic, and soldered badly.

Some here, I spotted at a car boot sale.

PL259s galore....

Here's a writeup by someone.

Got their timeline a bit muddled when talking about Raspberry Pi in the same paragraph as causes of the 1990's decline in component-level construction.

But spot-on when saying that once the shops no longer stocked a critical mass of component-level items, why would the traditional hobbyist want to go there at all. If you are going to have to get the "difficult" parts somewhere else, why not get all of them elsewhere.

However 'old' phones (probably bakelite 300 series) could be had for about £3 from J Bull or similar, and 'new' phones (probably 706) about ? ?5.

The bakelites have held their value well over nearly 40 years.

Owain

These days I just head to the RS website and look at the manufacturers' data sheets.

If I'm short of something that I want urgently, it's only 15 minutes to their trade counter too.

SteveW

yehbut in the heydays of the Maplin cat, you'd have been on dialup. ;-)

But not for 99.999999999999999999% of the population. ;-)

I wish I lived close enough to CPC's trade counter...

Can't they build one in the south of the country?

... who happens to be the editor of Everyday with Practical Electronics, one of the regular electronics mags, since approximately forever.

He links to rather interesting financial whodunit:

Theo

He, he, he - I'm only 40 minutes from CPC too!]

SteveW

There's was one that started off as Radio Spares now called RS.