On 01/05/2020 11:51, Adam Funk wrote:
On 2020-04-10, John Rumm wrote:

On 10/04/2020 09:01, charles wrote:
In article , John Rumm
wrote:
On 09/04/2020 12:53, charles wrote:
In article , Steve Walker
wrote:
On 09/04/2020 12:03, Peter Parry wrote:

Electronics Weekly has a report of the re launch of Maplin
Electronics (www.maplin.co.uk) as an on-line retailer

https://www.electronicsweekly.com/ne...duino-2020-03/

They'll have to make a good job of it and keep the prices down too.
When Maplin had become far more expensive than RS and never had more
than a few of each item in stock, it had clearly lost its way.

Mail order it would have to compete with RS, Farnell (plus their CPC
arm), Jaycar, Amazon and Ebay - and, for me at least, RS and CPC have
the advantage of trade counters for urgent purchases and Amazon has
very quick deliveries.

you've missed Rapid Electronics, the only one to be able to produce a
fuse holder for fuses about ¼inch* in diameter. RS had spare fuses, but
no holders. *I can't be bothered to find the relevant bit of kit to
check on the exact size.

The original Maplin was basically by post, but thre was a shop in
Southend.

and don't forget CAShTel :-)

and Henry's Radio. and Proops (a lunchtime excursion)

CASHTel (Computer Aided Shopping by Telephone) was an early Maplin BBS
style service, that you could use to do mail order and other stuff. You
used ASCII terminal software and a 2400bps modem or similar. It let you
enter order codes and quantities.

I quite liked using it at times (even though I only lived a 10 min walk
from the shop) since it let you assemble a long order while sat in front
of all your notes and documentation etc.

And all that without running 1 MB of javascript...


Mike Aldrich always liked to tell people that he invented home shopping
using a computer in 1980.

The computer was a modified 14 inch rediffusion colour tv with a Z80
SBC and modem kludged ?inside

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Aldrich

The Redifon site in Crawley was the size of 2 football fields where
a hundred or so people made data general nova mini clones with
in house software for key-to-disk data entry systems.

And I mean made. They made their own CPU boards, memory boards
terminal muxes, the lot. They only bought in printers, disks
tape drives and hard stuff like casings, boxes etc.

All gone by the early 90's after Bill Gates and the IBM PC
wiped out their target markets.