Tom's Life Bits

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===== Haven For Spare Parts =====
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Bob Ellingson with a transmitter detector from the cold war years at Halted Specialties, the electronics shop where he is a co-owner.\\

MOST retailers would recoil in horror at the thought of keeping unsold products on their shelves for 30 years. Not Halted Specialties Company. It’s willing to hold on to a few thousand vacuum tubes just in case the right buyer happens to wander into the store, be it this decade or the next.

Computer chips.

For close to 50 years, Halted has supplied the do-it-yourself electronics enthusiasts so common in Silicon Valley with just about anything they could imagine. Like the many electronics stores once populating the area, Halted helped turn entrepreneurs’ inklings into huge success stories. These days, however, Halted caters more to hobbyists than titans of industry because much of the fundamental computing manufacturing has moved to Asia.

Halted, in Santa Clara, Calif., is one of the last of a dying breed — a rough-around-the-edges electronics wonderland meant for people who just can’t find what they need at stores like Best Buy and Fry’s Electronics.

“It’s a little discouraging sometimes,” said Bob Ellingson, who co-owns Halted with Matt Dunstan. “You don’t see the start-up companies — the guys coming in that are setting up a bench. And they need to get pliers and cutters and soldering irons and solder. It’s not like it was.”

Halted’s cluttered shelves, stacked with everything from transistors to testing ovens (for baking semiconductors), point to a rich part of Silicon Valley’s history often lost in current discussions about smartphones, virtualization software and social networking applications. Before there was any silicon here at all, a flood of electronics pioneers were doing their best to compete with more mature, larger companies on the East Coast.

“The Homebrew Computer Club that used to meet up in Palo Alto would hang out at our store,” Mr. Ellingson said. “There were people coming out of the woodwork to try and make their own PCs.”

In fact, Apple’s co-founders, Steven P. Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, shopped at Halted, hunting down parts for their first products. During one of these visits, Hal Elzig, who founded Halted and died in 2005, turned down an offer to invest in what would become Apple.

“Hal remembered them driving around barefoot in a Volkswagen van,” Mr. Ellingson said. “They were a couple of young, scruffy-looking guys. He said, ‘I don’t want to give these guys any money.’ ”

Silicon Valley residents can recount myriad similar stories of people buying their first gear at stores like Halted that were once common. But as software rose in importance and design work shifted overseas, many of the electronics surplus shops shut down. Halted’s has changed with the times, placing it at the heart of the D.I.Y. set.

For example, Kurt Ishisaka, an engineer at Western Digital, turns to Halted for parts to build a homemade flight simulator console. Using some software expertise, Mr. Ishisaka pulls information out of Microsoft’s flight simulator application and displays it on the console screens, while also using other components to add levels of interaction between the console and the simulator software. He’s been at the project for three years.

“I mainly just try to build it whenever I have time,” Mr. Ishisaka said. “My wife doesn’t like me playing with this stuff too much.”

Other people work on making their own wireless network adapters and developing bespoke solar power systems.

To satisfy the broad set of hobbyist desires, Halted has turned what many might consider a junk collection into a chaotic art form.

The store appears to have minimal interest in rhyme or reason, with hunks of titanium randomly sitting on top of cabinets, ovens crammed into a corner behind a row of vacuum tubes and boxes of antivirus software tucked between routers and plugs. Entire aisles are dedicated to wires of various sizes and colors, while other aisles contain tens of thousands of resistors and transistors.

“We’ve had electron microscopes, which I think is fun to have,” Mr. Ellingson said. “There aren’t too many retail walk-in stores where you can go in and buy an electron microscope.”

Halted began by gathering surplus parts from Lockheed Martin and then selling the products to engineers, and it maintains that tradition today, obtaining the castoffs from local companies. But there’s less stuff to choose from now that companies can offer their inventory directly over the Internet.

Quite often, Mr. Ellingson will resort to turning up at someone’s house or store for a fresh batch of equipment.

“I call it the dead man’s tool chest,” Mr. Ellingson said. “It was a guy that ran a repair shop and died, and people are cleaning out his shop.”

A professed packrat, Mr. Ellingson keeps some of the most prized possessions to himself. On the weekends, these items go on display as shoppers discuss a cold war-era counterspy transmitter detector or an antique phonograph. Mr. Ellingson, however, has been willing to part with apparent weapons of unknown origin.

“I had something I got out of Lockheed awhile back that looked like a big torpedo,” Mr. Ellingson said. “It was in a great big wooden shipping box, but it had a camera on the front end. I never did quite figure out what it was for.”

Naturally, one Halted shopper bought the mystery item so he could take it apart.

Brian Yee, a ham radio operator, has frequented Halted over the years, buying parts for all manner of projects. One of his latest purchases is a satellite feed that allows him to operate on both 4 GHz and 10 GHz frequencies from one dish. This beauty cost Mr. Yee $25.

“That’s a deal,” Mr. Yee said. “You know hobbyists, we have to scrounge.”

Unlike the average retailer, Halted will negotiate prices from time to time, another personal touch.

“We’ll be the first to admit that we don’t know the absolute current market price for everything,” Mr. Ellingson said. “We’ll haggle or work a deal.”

Given its expertise with electronics equipment, Halted could expand to offer new products and the latest and greatest parts, just like flashier retailers. But that’s not exactly the company’s style.

“That’s not really been our game,” Mr. Ellingson said. “You have to stay on top of that stuff to be able to keep from buying into it and then ending up with dead inventory. We buy the dead inventory that’s still salable from other people. We try not to stay on the latest and greatest curve.”

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