Whenever I mention to folks that I used to work at Heathkit, a few people actually ask, “What’s Heathkit?” Yes, I suppose that does date me a bit. Others will say, “Oh, yes, my dad used to build Heathkits.” Anyway, some of you do remember Heathkit, and fondly in most cases. If not, let me explain.
There once was a time in electronics when you could actually build circuits and equipment yourself. You needed a design that you could create yourself—or if not, get from one of many magazines, including Electronic Design. You could buy the resistors, capacitors, transistors, or tubes in the olden days, then put them all together on a metal chassis, a breadboard, or a finished printed-circuit board (PCB). It was quite a project but doable, and many hobbyists like hams built these designs on a regular basis.
In the late 1940s and 1950s, someone invented the kit business. Companies designed a product and sold it as a bundle of parts called a kit. You could buy the kit for a fraction of what a comparable wired unit would cost and then build it yourself. The outcome was quite favorable—a workable electronic product and a great sense of accomplishment you got from the construction.
Heath was one of those companies that help started the kit business. Ed Heath founded the company in 1926 with, of all things, an airplane kit. He died in a test flight in one in 1935, but Howard Anthony kept the company going. Right after World War II, he bought a batch of electronic surplus. Out of that came one of the first successful kits, a small oscilloscope for $50, which was a real achievement in its time. With that success came many new products.
Heathkit probably succeeded more on its ham radio products than anything else. Most of the early kits were shortwave radios, transmitters, accessories like antenna tuners, and the famous Cantenna, a 1-kW non-inductive power resistor in a paint can with mineral oil for the heatsink. Heathkit went on to create an extensive line of small and large transceivers and big power amps, many of which are still operational today.
The Successful Years
Later in the 1950s and 1960s, Heathkit expanded into audio equipment, TV sets, and lots of other consumer products. The company even had a low-cost line of test equipment with scopes, multimeters, generators, counters, and other items. While Heathkit had competitors like Allied Knight, Lafayette, Eico, and a few other smaller companies, it essentially beat the pants off everyone else because it had a better product.
But Heathkit’s good reputation really came from offering a better assembly manual than anyone else. A poorly executed step-by-step manual is a prescription for disaster for any kit company. If the customer can’t build the kit successfully without massive telephone and mail support, it would die a quick death, and many did. Heathkit figured this out early and spent as much development time in the manual as it did engineering the product. Its primary marketing message was “We won’t let you fail,” and the company lived up to it.
I went to Heathkit in the early 1970s to start its education and publishing product line. The idea was to extend the concept that building a kit was an educational endeavor and that we could expand on that idea with more formal learning materials to supplement the kits. We built a line of self-instructional courses on electronic fundamentals and a wide range of other topics. A line of kit trainers accompanied the instructional materials. The first products emerged in 1974 and were instantly successful. We followed up with microprocessor learning packages, which were hot for their time. And, we developed the Hero robot kit that came out in 1982.
I was also involved with the development of the Heathkit computers. We created the H8 and the H11, not to mention the H9 terminal, and of all things the H10, a paper tape reader/punch. (What was I thinking?) The H11 kit used Digital Equipment Corporation’s (DEC) famous LSI-11 board. We packaged that into kit form with some 8-in. hard drives (remember those?) and the RT-11 operating system with Basic—not bad for $1200 at that time. The all-in-one H89 and others came later.