Certainly, in a way, Heathkit is SparkFun's predecessor and one of the founders of the entire DIY movement. It is quite an honor to be compared so favorably to Heathkit, a company that, for many of us here at SparkFun, introduced us to electronics. So when this article titled " The Rise and Fall of Heathkit - And Rise of SparkFun" by Electronic Design's Communication Editor Lou Frenzel came out, it definitely brought back some memories. I loved the idea of a company like Heathkit, but by that time they were pretty much out of the electronic kit business.
For a 15-year old kid, it was actually pretty cool. He used it to teach me about resistor color codes and what a diode does. We looked over the "Theory of Operation" section and he explained to me what some of it meant. How he had saved his money for the kit, ordered it, and then put it together. My dad took me aside and explained how he built it. Turns out, it was my dad's old Heathkit Preamplifier. On top of the stereo was a manual with the words " Heathkit" across the front. So it might come as no surprise that one day, while rummaging through my grandpa's basement, I came across a dusty box with what appeared to be a stereo in it. Going way back, my great-grandfather was a blacksmith on the Midland Railroad (maybe not a formal engineer, but some of the stuff he built certainly took some engineering acumen). My grandfather on my mom's side is also an engineer and worked for HP for many years. My dad is a metalurgical engineer and works in failure analysis for Atmel. I'm not an engineer, but I certainly grew up in a family of them.
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