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Dick Smith’s Wizzard-ry 8 (Bit)

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Re: Dick Smith’s Wizzard-ry 8 (Bit)

#21

Post by aragilar »

glaucon wrote: post #8
lmpdev wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did that compare to the current Jaycar/Altronics/etc offerings? I imagine a sleeping zombie

Up until, say, 2005 they were pretty similar to current Jaycar but, I think perhaps after an acquisition, they started selling branded audio/computers etc and the geeky stuff gradually became less prominent. At some point they got bought by Australian Woolworths. The shops began to look more like mainstream "electronics" shops than Jaycar does now. Then the whole lot came tumbling down. The DS name and domain got sol…

No, was bad in AU too, see https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-05/dick-smith-enters-vol... and https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-05/dick-smith-receivers-....

Re: Dick Smith’s Wizzard-ry 8 (Bit)

#22

Post by boffinAudio »

RetroTechie wrote: post #19
boffinAudio wrote: post #5

>I asked Cheshire if he had something to test with, and he just smiled and sent me a Sonic Invaders cartridge. I’m pretty sure that’s how the song goes. LOL. Good one, mate. As someone who grew up with the Dick Smith Electronics Fun Way 1 & 2 books, which were dog-eared and well-loved way into the 90's, it tickles me to no end that HN occasionally gets articles about this utter genius. And, as a retro-computing enthu…

Project described is very cool! Kudoz to Mike, the author. Personally I'd never do a clone of an obscure system like that. Why? Clone a (once) popular system, and when it works, you've got a wealth of software to run on it day 0. Including software useful during development like test ROMs, debuggers, assemblers, stuff that doesn't need keyboard input to show something (as mentioned in article), etc. And if that softw…

I agree with you - but I think both the ZX Spectrum Next and the Fenix256 both comply with your last statement .. but with the added advantage that backwards compatibility (in the case of the Next) provides a plethora of existing titles - whereas the Fenix256 is just too damned cool not to write code for, from the get-go ..

Re: Dick Smith’s Wizzard-ry 8 (Bit)

#23

Post by ssss11 »

glaucon wrote: post #8
lmpdev wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did that compare to the current Jaycar/Altronics/etc offerings? I imagine a sleeping zombie

Up until, say, 2005 they were pretty similar to current Jaycar but, I think perhaps after an acquisition, they started selling branded audio/computers etc and the geeky stuff gradually became less prominent. At some point they got bought by Australian Woolworths. The shops began to look more like mainstream "electronics" shops than Jaycar does now. Then the whole lot came tumbling down. The DS name and domain got sol…

In Aus the Kogan acquisition was their tombstone. Dick Smith who started the company was a legend, it’s a shame. Jaycar is the best electronics retailer we have now.

Re: Dick Smith’s Wizzard-ry 8 (Bit)

#24

Post by balou23 »

lqet wrote: post #10
lmpdev wrote: post #3

Off topic: I'm a developer who got burnt out after a few years I currently work at one of Dick Smith’s former competitors, Jaycar It’s utterly bizarre working in such a company. The sheer range of backgrounds of the people you work with is immense I’ve met genuinely top of their field “between grant” astro-physicists and kids who wouldn’t pass Year 12 It’s what I imagine working at RadioShack was like in the States,…

When I access https://www.jaycar.com.au/ from Europe, I get a 503 on every page (although the website says its a 404: "Great Scott! Page Not Found... It looks like the flux capacitor has overloaded and sent the page you're looking for back to the past.").

I get a "website down" message, and a neat little space invaders game to play. Quite neat actually, all in a 24kb html file without external dependencies of any kind

Re: Dick Smith’s Wizzard-ry 8 (Bit)

#25

Post by pkaye »

boffinAudio wrote: post #6
hcfman wrote: post #2

They were nice shops. Before that in Auckland we had John Gilberts electronics. Dick Smith's increased the availability of what you could get by quite a lot.

Australian 80's hacker here .. Between Computer Age, TANDY Electronics, and Dick Smith Electronics shops, a budding early-80's hacker could get access to a lot of technology to sharpen their teeth. I had many great times getting kicked out of TANDY only to cross the street to DSE and continue my hacking .. ;)

I think we had a few Dick Smith Electronics shops in the US in the 80s. I seem to recall I went to one in the SF bay area when I was young.

https://www.retroist.com/p/1982-commercial-for-dick-smiths-e...

Re: Dick Smith’s Wizzard-ry 8 (Bit)

#26

Post by olliej »

I started electronics as a youngster with the Dick Smith's "Fun Way into Electronics" sets which were really great. They came with a board you could screw into to link components, etc and general introduction to everything involved.

Internet archive has the books themselves archived: https://archive.org/details/dicksmithsfunwayintoelectronicsv...

Re: Dick Smith’s Wizzard-ry 8 (Bit)

#27

Post by bentpins »

lmpdev wrote: post #4
hcfman wrote: post #2

They were nice shops. Before that in Auckland we had John Gilberts electronics. Dick Smith's increased the availability of what you could get by quite a lot.

How did that compare to the current Jaycar/Altronics/etc offerings? I imagine a sleeping zombie

I have fond memories of Dick Smith. My dad bought my first soldering iron, along with some soldering projects (I remember the FM Wireless Microphone from here https://ia801002.us.archive.org/3/items/dicksmithsfunwayinto... ). You could tell the people creating the kits were really keen to share their love of electronics.

You could buy loose components out of trays, and it seemed like they had a bunch more unusual adapters and gadgets that wouldn't interest a typical consumer. But they gradually became just a retailer for big brand items.

Re: Dick Smith’s Wizzard-ry 8 (Bit)

#28

Post by lastyearmodel »

ssss11 wrote: post #23
glaucon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until, say, 2005 they were pretty similar to current Jaycar but, I think perhaps after an acquisition, they started selling branded audio/computers etc and the geeky stuff gradually became less prominent. At some point they got bought by Australian Woolworths. The shops began to look more like mainstream "electronics" shops than Jaycar does now. Then the whole lot came tumbling down. The DS name and domain got sol…

In Aus the Kogan acquisition was their tombstone. Dick Smith who started the company was a legend, it’s a shame. Jaycar is the best electronics retailer we have now.

I'd probably only correct that Jaycar is the best brick and mortar electronics retailer we have now.

Re: Dick Smith’s Wizzard-ry 8 (Bit)

#29

Post by glaucon »

aragilar wrote: post #21
glaucon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until, say, 2005 they were pretty similar to current Jaycar but, I think perhaps after an acquisition, they started selling branded audio/computers etc and the geeky stuff gradually became less prominent. At some point they got bought by Australian Woolworths. The shops began to look more like mainstream "electronics" shops than Jaycar does now. Then the whole lot came tumbling down. The DS name and domain got sol…

No, was bad in AU too, see https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-05/dick-smith-enters-vol... and https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-05/dick-smith-receivers-... .

Thanks for the references. I had forgotten the sale from Woolworths to a Private Equity group.

I'm sorry this is bit off topic but I do think the description, within https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-05/dick-smith-enters-vol... , of what took place in the brief period between when the Private Equity group bought Dick Smith and when they floated it is well worth reading.

FWIW my experience of seeing this stuff happens is it only works where you have a company that non-institutional investors think they know and understand. In the case of Dick Smith it was a well liked and very visible brand within Australia. If the same financial engineering had been done to some obscure industrial group the Private Equity group would have had to rely on selling the shares to institutions and they would have been much more aware of what they were buying.

Here's the segment from the ABC piece ...

Private equity group Anchorage Capital bought Dick Smith from Woolworths in 2012 for an initial payment of just $20m.

Anchorage then "dressed the company up to look good for just one thing - to persuade people to buy shares," according to analysts from Forager Funds Management.

Anchorage "wrote down the value of the inventory, took provisions for future onerous lease payments, wrote down the value of the plant and equipment and liquidated a lot of the inventory as quickly as they possibly could to throw off cash," according to Forager's Steve Johnson.

The cash was then used by Anchorage to effectively make Dick Smith 'buy itself'.

The writedowns inflated profits, a key factor in enticing investors into the company.

For example: a stock item that may have been bought for $100 may have been in the books at $60 after the writedowns, which meant an extra $40 profit on every sale.

The writedown of plant and equipment lowered depreciation charges, also boosting the bottom line.

"But when they liquidated all that inventory to pay for the purchase price, they didn't replace it," according to Forager's Steve Johnson.

"And the new owners of the business, since it's been listed on the stock market, have had to put in a lot more money to fund the increase in inventory."

Re: Dick Smith’s Wizzard-ry 8 (Bit)

#30

Post by boffinAudio »

pkaye wrote: post #25
boffinAudio wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australian 80's hacker here .. Between Computer Age, TANDY Electronics, and Dick Smith Electronics shops, a budding early-80's hacker could get access to a lot of technology to sharpen their teeth. I had many great times getting kicked out of TANDY only to cross the street to DSE and continue my hacking .. ;)

I think we had a few Dick Smith Electronics shops in the US in the 80s. I seem to recall I went to one in the SF bay area when I was young. https://www.retroist.com/p/1982-commercial-for-dick-smiths-e...

Nice, I didn't know that. In Australia they were a very welcome hang out for the neighborhood computer kids. A lot friendlier than the Computer Age folks, although I did get a lot more coding done in those shops ..
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