[HN Gopher] Dick Smith (Entrepreneur)
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Dick Smith (Entrepreneur)
Author : wglb
Score : 43 points
Date : 2021-11-19 18:07 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| harry8 wrote:
| The Business Review Weekly (BRW) put Dick on the "Australia's
| Richest" list. He rang them up to complain. Found out how much
| money you needed to have to be on it then made charitable
| donations to get under that mark for his wealth. BRW took him off
| the list.
| bitwize wrote:
| Fun fact: Dick Smith Electronics offered tech support for their
| products in an attempt to emulate Apple's Genius Bar. The
| official name for Dick Smith's support technicians? Clever Dicks.
| underwater wrote:
| He also marketted an alternative to "Redhead" matches which he
| called "Dickheads".
| __d wrote:
| IIRC, the tagline for some of his advertising was "The
| Electronic Dick". Different times.
| schappim wrote:
| On a grey morning on April 1, 1978, an iceberg floated into
| Sydney Harbour.
|
| Talkback radio went into meltdown as hundreds of callers jammed
| the switchboards to report the bizarre sight. People headed for
| the harbour, boats were launched and for several hours, the media
| provided a blow-by-blow account of the scene.
|
| Then it started raining, the iceberg 'melted' and Sydney's most
| elaborate April Fools hoax was revealed.
|
| The prank was the brainchild of 34-year-old electronics
| entrepreneur Dick Smith.
|
| [1] https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/sydney-april-
| fool...
| nsajko wrote:
| There are (disappointing) photographs here:
| http://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/the_sydney_iceberg/
| desertraven wrote:
| Dick Smith is a legend. Great sense of humour, prioritising
| philanthropy and buying local.
|
| My favourite product of his was the parody of Redhead Matches, a
| box of matches with a woman's face on it. Dick sold matches
| called "Dickheads", with his face on them.
|
| A friend of mine growing up had Dick perform an emergency landing
| on their property (in his plane). He must still be an avid flyer
| as we both attended the same aviation event a couple of years ago
| in a rural Australian town.
| threeseed wrote:
| > Dick Smith is a legend
|
| He was a legend.
|
| For many of us in Australia he is remembered more for his
| racist, xenophobic views and efforts in advising the One Nation
| party.
| nsajko wrote:
| > racist, xenophobic views and efforts in advising the One
| Nation party
|
| Mind elaborating? If you were referring to the news item from
| 2016, it seems to me that you may be misrepresenting Smith:
| https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
| news/2016/dec/06/dick-...
| rajamaka wrote:
| I thought he was just a proponent for "Small Australia" and
| by extension of that anti-immigration?
|
| Never really heard anything racist or xenophobic from him but
| to be fair having paid that much attention.
| neurotech1 wrote:
| I had the pleasure of meeting Dick at a Christmas party many
| years ago.
|
| Buying locally made, locally owned is a major priority of his
| and should be for every Australian.
| desertraven wrote:
| Wholeheartedly agree. Your comment gives me Aussie vibes, yet
| it looks like you're in the US. Did you relocate?
| ravenstine wrote:
| Wow, I always kind of assumed Dick Smith was just a fictional
| mascot like Betty Crocker, but he was a real dude.
|
| I lived in New Zealand for a short while growing up and we used
| to refer to Dick Smith Electronics as "Dip-shit Electronics"
| because the prices could be pretty outrageous. It was otherwise a
| pretty cool store, though; think somewhere between Radio Shack
| and Best Buy.
| flog wrote:
| DSE was an absolute rip off, but it was pretty much the only
| game in town.
|
| As a kid it was an amazing place for me to spend an hour on the
| weekends pottering around all the electronic kitsets and latest
| computer parts/gadgets.
|
| I would credit DSE with fostering a lot of my love of computers
| and technology. I am quite sad it no longer exists.
| ravenstine wrote:
| That reminds me... on top of the shifts in society because of
| COVID, it's a shame that there's no place like Dick Smith,
| Frys, Radio Shack, computer stores, etc., where young geeks
| can go and meet each other. I was a geek among geeks as a
| kid, but even then I still liked that I could go to
| electronics stores, comic shops, hobby stores, and just be
| around people who were kind of weird like me and also had a
| love for the sorts of things I was interested in. With most
| of today's meetups _still_ being "remote", at least where I
| live, I have to wonder where the hell a young me would be
| able to go today. I'd just have to network through Discord
| and hope that my server doesn't suddenly get banned because
| Dischord Inc. thinks it's a group of "hackers".
|
| Basically, I think there was something to having physical
| places to go to. It's a culture that seems nearly dead.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Indeed, the places that sell 5 cent resistors etc were
| where I would hang out. But nobody does that anymore.
| People just buy the cheap crap from Aliexpress :'( And
| nonbody makes enough money selling individual components.
|
| It's such a stark difference. I remember there being a
| Radio Shack in mainstream retail centres like Broadway
| Shopping Centre.
|
| Now if you find a similar shop it'll be in some run-down
| industrial estate :'(
| barrysaunders wrote:
| Jaycar still does a lot of this! The one in Central Park
| Sydney still does a lot of workshops, they have a maker
| hub, sell a lot of the class electronic components and
| things like that. Nothing like it used to be with Dick
| Smith and Radio Shack everywhere, but there's still a few
| places around.
| __d wrote:
| Jaycar has taken over the "over-priced retail" segment of
| the electronics store market that DSE used to hold (and
| Tandy before that). But most of the old stores are gone
| as everything has moved online.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| I don't know that is entirely true. My local Jaycar
| (regional Australia) is still a good source for smaller
| bits and bobs, and I buy a lot of stuff there like
| circuit board varnish that nobody else would bother to
| stock. even then I don't mind paying a small premium for
| a USB cable or whatever because having a jaycar locally
| is fantastic for what I do.
|
| They still have a decent selection of things like
| soldering irons and other tools and a little selection of
| Raspberry Pi and Arduino kits, along with hobby cases,
| switches, plugs, wire, solder, batteries etc.
| kiwidrew wrote:
| I didn't encounter DSE until the mid 2000s when I moved
| to NZ, but the Jaycar of today stocks way more components
| than did the DSE of 20 years ago. Jaycar even keeps a
| stock of 74LS TTL chips behind the counter!
| barbs wrote:
| I used to work at one of those, after Woolworths had bought it.
| I had expected the job to be more about explaining how
| electronics work and finding the right thing to solve the
| customer's technical problems but it was all very sales
| focussed.
| Taniwha wrote:
| Yeah Disk Smith came in to NZ and replaced a perfectly good
| electronics parts wholesaler with over priced retail crud
| jsmeaton wrote:
| Are you talking about the Kogan-clone that took over the
| online store about 5 or 6 years ago, or prior to that? The
| online part of the business was sold off to Kogan and became
| another online store front.
| Taniwha wrote:
| I'm talking about what happened in the 80s
| schappim wrote:
| Dick is a marketing genius.
|
| If memory serves correct, when Skylab was being deorbited
| (eventually partially over Australia), Dick Smith provided free
| insurance cover to anyone standing in his Australian stores.
| sossles wrote:
| Dick Smith Electronics was a huge part of my childhood. The "Fun
| Way" electronics books (written by Dick himself) was fascinating
| to me and the VZ-300 computer they sold was how I got into
| computers as a kid. It was great to discover as an adult that
| Dick himself was also such an amazing character.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yeahh I used to go to the shop in Sydney. But when I was there it
| already wasn't owned by him anymore.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| He is a persona non grata since he started advocating for
| sustainable population policies.
|
| Funny how nobody talks about that any more. I've had an
| "environmentalist" get red faced and belligerent toward me for
| daring to suggest the most effective way to reduce humanity's
| environmental footprint would be to reduce population. Insisting
| that the earth's human carrying capacity was 100 billion(!!) and
| therefore I was wrong and population didn't matter. Scary.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Total random fact: Dick Smith's name is on the sponsorship signs
| on top of the hill on the Bathurst track, just before Skyline
| corner. In iRacing it's such a common place to crash that I know
| more than one person calling it "Dick Smith" corner to explain
| where things went wrong.
| rasz wrote:
| Tricky Dicks!
|
| 'Dick Smith Electronics - A conversation with Dick Smith' from
| 2010 for State of Electronics
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVQTZluvrUs
| vosper wrote:
| Working through Dick Smith's Fun Way into Electronics is a fond
| memory from my childhood. I don't remember if I got all the way
| through the second volume, but I sure do remember screwing
| component pins down onto those blue breadboards, and trying to
| figure out where I'd gone wrong.
| curl_e wrote:
| I learned electronics from
|
| https://archive.org/details/dicksmithsfunwayintoelectronicsv...
|
| pasting the circuit diagram on to a block of wood and screwing
| down the components...
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(page generated 2021-11-21 23:00 UTC)