[GTALUG] another unique store gone: Above All Electronic Surplus

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Stewart C. Russell via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| Losing Active Surplus a few years back was bad, but this one seems worse:
| long-established electronic surplus/weird stuff/junk store Above All
| Electronic Surplus (635 Bloor W, at Euclid) is closed.

I blame me, and people like me.  We stopped giving them enough
business.

I used to love Active.  I'd go on regular fishing trips there.  And
the place around the corner on Beverley.  Starting in the mid 1970s.
We introduced our kids to the place in the late 1980s.

Active had a connected store with surplus machine shop equipment.

It used to be that electronic stuff was expensive.  Repair was
possible.  It seemed worth gleaning old parts.  But eventually, new
electronics got inexpensive, complex, and hard to hack.

Active got a new lease on life selling to OCAD folks.  My daughter
reminds me that there was a perennial bin labelled "red things".  Lots
of acrylic sheets.  Second world haemostats and the like.  Weird
optical devices (military range-finders?).  Pixelboards from the TTC.

Now about the gorilla.  I first saw it in Kitchener, at a somehow
related surplus store.  I don't know if there were two, or, if one,
which store had it first.

I can't quite remember, but I think that I bought my 64k RAM board for
my Altair at the Kitchener store.  It would only work if I installed
it just so: I think that it was a clone of a mainstream board, and in
cloning it, they had shrunk the board end-to-end by about the width of
half a trace on the connector.

It can think of a variety of reasons that active might have died:

- fewer local manufacturers and hence less surplus

- Queen St. real estate got quite valuable

- owners got older

I went to its last day on Queen and bought a few things that I still
use.  I have still have an orange price tag that I transplanted to my
notebook.

Above All was better in a number of ways.  But none of them drew me.
I visited a few times but bought almost nothing.  I came out with a
good serving of nostalgia.

If I really need an oddball old part, there are lots of internet
vendors.  After I consider the excessive scrap I already have, kept
"just in case".