DIY Subculture
Heathkit
15 October 2008
Heathkits were products of the Heath Company, Benton Harbor, Michigan. Their products included electronic test equipment, high fidelity home audio equipment, television receivers, amateur radio equipment, and the influential Heath H-8, H-89, and H-11 hobbyist computers, which were sold in kit form for assembly by the purchaser. Today, audio kits are known as DIY audio ("do it yourself" audio).
Founding
The Heath Company was originally founded as an aircraft company in the early 1900s by Edward Bayard Heath. Starting in 1926 it sold a light aircraft, the Heath Parasol, in kit form. Heath died during a 1931 test flight. In 1935, Howard Anthony purchased the then-bankrupt Heath Company, and focused on selling accessories for small aircraft. After World War II, Anthony decided that entering the electronics industry was a good idea, and bought a large stock of surplus wartime electronic parts with the intention of building kits with them. In 1947, Heath introduced its first electronic kit, an oscilloscope that sold for US$50 -- the price was unbeatable at the time, and the oscilloscope went on to be a huge seller.
What made a Heathkit special
After the success of the oscilloscope kit, Heath went on to produce dozens of Heathkit products. Heathkits were influential in shaping two generations of electronic hobbyists. The Heathkit sales premise was that by investing the time to assemble a Heathkit, the purchaser could build something comparable to a factory-built product at a very significantly lower cash cost. During those decades, the premise was basically valid. Commercial factory-built electronic products were constructed from generic, discrete components such as vacuum tubes, tube sockets, capacitors, inductors and resistors, and essentially hand-wired and assembled. The home kit-builder could perform the same assembly tasks himself, and if careful, to at least the same standard of quality. In the case of their most expensive product, the Thomas electronic organ, building the Heathkit version represented very substantial savings.
One category in which Heathkit enjoyed great popularity was amateur radio. Ham radio operators had frequently been forced to build their equipment from scratch before the advent of kits, with the difficulty of procuring all the parts separately and relying on often-experimental designs. Kits brought the convenience of all parts being supplied together and the assurance of a predictable finished product; many Heathkit models became well-known in the ham radio community.
The exterior fit and finish of the Heathkit enclosures was not always quite up to the standards of factory-built products, but a Heathkit amplifier, for instance, did not look out of place in a living room. The technical characteristics of many Heathkits were good. The ordinary consumer would, of course, buy a factory-built phonograph from the likes of RCA; but an audiophile, who was serious enough to assemble a system from individual components, frequently gave serious consideration to Heathkit products.
In the case of electronic test equipment, Heathkits often filled a low-end niche. A Hewlett-Packard, Tektronix, or Fluke product might have metal vernier dials or ten-turn pots with digital readouts, while a Heathkit might use a simple plastic pointer and a scale silk-screened onto the front panel. A $40 Heathkit oscilloscope might not be remotely comparable to a factory-built oscilloscope—but there were no $40 (or even $100) factory-built oscilloscopes.
Building a Heathkit required time, patience, and the ability to follow directions; given these, the risk of failure was small. Heathkits were absolutely complete except for tools. The instruction books were regarded as the best in the kit industry, being models of clarity, beginning with basic lessons on soldering technique, and proceeding with explicit directions, illustrated with line drawings, and a box to tick as each task was accomplished.
No knowledge of electronics was needed to assemble a Heathkit. The assembly process did not teach much about electronics, but provided a great deal of what could have been called "electronics literacy," such as the ability to identify tube pin numbers or read a resistor color code. Many hobbyists began by assembling Heathkits, became familiar with the appearance of components like capacitors, transformers, and tubes, and were motivated to find out just what these components actually did. Heath developed a relationship with electronics correspondence schools (e.g., NRI). Heath supplied electronic kits to be assembled as part of courses, with the school basing its texts and lessons around the kit.
For much of Heathkit's existence, there were competitors. In electronic kits: Allied Radio, an electronic parts supply house, had its KnightKits, Lafayette Radio offered some kits, Radio Shack made a few forays into this market (mainly with reconfigurable "100-in-1"-type systems), Dynaco made its audio products available in kit form (Dynakits), as did H. H. Scott, Inc., Fisher and Eico; and later such companies as Southwest Technical Products. Many garage industries supplied less polished kits based on build-it-yourself articles in the electronics hobbyist press. Few had anything comparable to the quality, diversity, polish, and influence of the Heathkits.
Diversification and the digital era
After the death of Howard Anthony in 1954, Heath was bought by Daystrom Company, a management holding company that also owned several other electronics companies. Daystrom was absorbed by oilfield service company Schlumberger Limited in 1962, and the Daystrom/Schlumberger days were Heathkit's most successful. Those years saw some "firsts" in the general consumer market. The early 60s saw the introduction of the AA-100 integrated amplifier. This was an all transistor unit of reliable quality (and affordable) that was produced several years before any other major hi-fi company produced anything comparable. The early 70s saw Heath introduce the AJ-1510, an FM tuner using digital synthesis, and the GC-1005 digital clock. Again, these components were quality products and were produced well ahead of anyone else in the industry. In 1974, Heathkit started Heathkit Educational Systems, which expanded their manuals' clear writing style into general electronics and computer training materials. Heathkit also expanded their expertise into digital and, eventually, computerized equipment, producing among other things digital clocks and weather stations with the new technology.
Kits were compiled in small batches mostly by hand, using roller assembly lines. These lines were put up and taken down as needed. Some kits were sold completely "assembled and tested" in the factory. These models were differentiated with a W in front of the model number.
The last great flourishing of the Heathkit was probably the 1978 introduction of the Heathkit H-8 computer. The earliest computers had been sold as kits to begin with, but were somewhat primitive. in contrast, Heath had real experience in producing kit electronic equipment and the Heath name carried confidence with it. The H-8 was successful, as were the H-19 and H-29 terminals, and the H-89 one piece terminal/computer (The H-8 and H-89 ran their custom operating system, HDOS). The H-11, a low-end DEC PDP-11 16-bit computer, was less successful probably because it was substantially more expensive than the 8-bit computer line.
Seeing the potential in personal computers, Zenith Radio Company bought Heath Company from Schlumberger in 1979, renaming the computer division Zenith Data Systems (ZDS). Zenith purchased Heath for the flexible assembly line infrastructure at the nearby St. Joseph facility as well as the R&D assets.
Heath/Zenith was in the vanguard of companies to start selling personal computers to small business. The H-89 kit was re-branded as the Z89/Z90, an assembled all in one system with a monitor and a floppy disk drive. They had agreements with Peachtree software to sell a customized "turn-key" version of their accounting, CPA and real estate management software. Shortly after the release of the Z90, they released a 5MB hard disk unit and double density external floppy disk drives.
While the H11 was popular with hard-core hobbyists, Heath engineers realized that DEC design would not be able to get Heath up the road to more powerful systems. Heath/Zenith then designed a dual Intel 8085/8088 based system dubbed the H-100 (or Z-100, in preassembled form). The machine featured very advanced (for the day) bit mapped video that allowed up to 640 x 512 pixels of 8 color graphics. The 100 was interesting in that it could run either the CP/M operating system, or their OEM version of MS-DOS (Z-DOS), which were the two leading business PC operating systems at the time. Although the machine had to be rebooted to change modes, they could read each other's disks.
The kit era comes to a close
By the 1980s, the continuation of the integration trend (printed circuit boards, integrated circuits, etc), and mass production of electronics (perhaps especially computers overseas and in plug in modules) eroded the basic Heathkit business model. Assembling a kit might still be fun, but it could no longer save much money. The switch to surface mount components and LSI ICs (many of which were custom made and not available in small quantities to the general public, much less to Heath) finally made it impossible for the home assembler to construct an electronic device which was competitive with assembly line factory products. As sales of its kits dwindled during the decade, Heath relied on its training materials and a new venture in home automation and lighting products to stay afloat. When Zenith eventually sold ZDS to Groupe Bull in 1989, Heathkit was included in the deal.
On March 30, 1992, the end came. Heath announced that it was closing out its kits and leaving the business after 45 years.
The Heathkit company still exists (and is still located in Benton Harbor), and now concentrates on the Educational Systems side of the business; it has not resumed making kits, though it does still have the schematic and manual library, and has pointers to people that can help with the older equipment. Heathkit has been through several owners since 1989; in 1995 it was sold by Bull to a private investor group called HIG, which then sold it to another investment group in 1998. Wanting to only concentrate on the educational products, this group sold the Heath/Zenith name and products to DESA International, a maker of specialty tools and heaters.
