Heathkit

When I was younger one of the first things that got me interested in electronics was a box my father had sitting in our garage closet. He was also a radio amateur, KA4SRJ; although with his busy work schedule he did not have much time to dedicate to the hobby.

After my inquiry he began to teach me about electronics and the fascinating world of amateur radio.

In a nutshell Healthkit was a kit electronics company which manufactured do it yourself soldering electronic kits, among other things. Consider it as a Ramsey Electronics on steroids.

Taken from Wikipedia:

Heathkits were products of the Heath Company, Benton Harbor, Michigan. Their products included electronic test equipment, high fidelity home audio equipment, television receivers, amateur radio equipment, and the influential Heath H-8, H-89, and H-11 hobbyist computers, which were sold in kit form for assembly by the purchaser.

The Heath Company was originally founded as an aircraft company in the early 1900s by Edward Bayard Heath. Starting in 1926 it sold a light aircraft, the Heath Parasol, in kit form. Heath died during a 1931 test flight. In 1935, Howard Anthony purchased the then-bankrupt Heath Company, and focused on selling accessories for small aircraft. After World War II, Anthony decided that entering the electronics industry was a good idea, and bought a large stock of surplus wartime electronic parts with the intention of building kits with them. In 1947, Heath introduced its first electronic kit, an oscilloscope that sold for US$50 -- the price was unbeatable at the time, and the oscilloscope went on to be a huge seller.

After the success of the oscilloscope kit, Heath went on to produce dozens of Heathkit products. Heathkits were influential in shaping two generations of electronic hobbyists. The Heathkit sales premise was that by investing the time to assemble a Heathkit, the purchaser could build something comparable to a factory-built product at a very significantly lower cash cost. During those decades, the premise was basically valid. Commercial factory-built electronic products were constructed from generic, discrete components such as vacuum tubes, tube sockets, capacitors, inductors and resistors, and essentially hand-wired and assembled. The home kit-builder could perform the same assembly tasks himself, and if careful, to at least the same standard of quality. In the case of their most expensive product, the Thomas electronic organ, building the Heathkit version represented very substantial savings.

One category in which Heathkit enjoyed great popularity was amateur radio. Ham radio operators had frequently been forced to build their equipment from scratch before the advent of kits, with the difficulty of procuring all the parts separately and relying on often-experimental designs. Kits brought the convenience of all parts being supplied together and the assurance of a predictable finished product; many Heathkit models became well-known in the ham radio community.