I'll be honest, moving from Los Angeles to Baton Rouge was a total downer for my love of all things used electronics. I had Apex Electronics in the Valley, W6TRW swap meets each month and other assorted places to go. Moved to the dirty dirty and I'm relegated to Best Buy, really small ham fests and monthly auctions at the state surplus. Meh...
My son is into mechanical keyboards and I had found this place on a Google search before I got to Houston. I had to drag him kicking and screaming out of the hotel room as he had gotten a keyboard from Fry's and wanted to play with it. I drove down the road from my hotel and we got there with only 45 minutes before they closed.
I walked in and almost cried. I had come home, this was my place. Isles and isles of electronics parts, new and used. Hundreds of nooks and crannies jammed with every part imaginable for doing anything electronic diy, repair, robotics, mad scientist tinkering, etc. I'm an audio engineer and synthesizer nerd so I went to the back, to go through all their gear. I love just looking at old technology. They had plenty of old test gear lining the tops of cabinets and old computers everywhere!
When one of the staff asked if we needed any help, I told them I was looking for old computer keyboards, we found their current selection, but my son being a mechanical keyboard expert (more like snob) wasn't too happy. Trying to teach him the value of digging to find the good deal or the right thing, this is the kind of place that sometimes the staff may not know what they have. The best kind of place ever (like Apex Electronics in the Valley in LA, look it up, insanity).
One of the owners (?) walked us around to a far isle and pointed at a keyboard hanging from the ceiling on a string, and there it was a keyboard from a Texas Instruments Silent 700 (introduced in 1971) the year my son's old man (me) was born. They wanted $30 for it, so we got it. At that moment my kid learned something from this old man, that going to old places like this does turn up gold. Passing the baton of searching for junk has been complete. I can now die a happy man. My son will continue my quest for hoarding old electronics where he goes.
We have already planned our next trip to Houston so that we can spend an entire day here, we're saving up a budget to spend some $$$ here. There's other things to see and do in Houston, but for me this was one of the highlights of my trip, and for the 45 minutes I was there it was time well spent.
We will be back. read more