Wow. Absolutely stunning. I had forgotten all about DAK, but I must have spent hours poring over each catalog (the earliest I remember is the 1985 one), and could spend days re-reading now.
The funny thing is -- and I don't see it mentioned anywhere -- the hyperbole felt like something bordering on a scam as I grew older. I think it's one of those things where, as you grow up, you realize the way you read it literally as a naive kid is not the same way you read it as an adult, so you feel this strange disconnect between the promise being sold and what the product actually does.
Of course, I was never able to actually buy anything from DAK, but his writing truly drove my interest in technology.
I recall we (my family) bought a couple things from them. The big thing about DAK, Sharper Image, etc was that this wasn't just selling regular electronic stuff. They were selling electronics that were new inventions. So the hype was not just on the product, but the product category -- CD players, Bread Machines, DVD-ROM with massive databases [such as encyclopedias, greatest book collections, etc], and all the hi-fi equipment such as compact speakers with a separate subwoofer.
This is something that makes be a bit sad in that now that I have money to buy whatever, there isn't anything "new" category wise (just upgrades on existing tech) that are worth buying. I miss dreaming about gadgets. I think the closest modern gadget that opens up a new category to play in is things like 3D printers and laser cutters/etchers.
The internet and globalization of markets and cheap shipping has taken a lot of the wonder away. It used to be a friend would go to Japan and come back with this absolutely futuristic walkman that simply wasn't available in the US market, and looked like nothing you had ever seen before. That's not really a thing anymore, and to the extent that it is (there are still products that aren't sold/marketed worldwide for various reasons), you can always just buy it on eBay or something.
What types of products would these be? Are they new categories of products, or variations of items that we currently have but work in a novel way? Examples would be ebikes before they were widely available, or electric cars that is more ebike material than car material.
> the hyperbole felt like something bordering on a scam as I grew older
I think with the benefit of hindsight we can recognize techno hype as a kind of creative writing genre in itself. People got pleasure from reading it even if they never bought any of the products. And part of the joy of all but the most utilitarian product is always the fiction around it. People sell pans with dreams of Tuscany. Maybe it's good sometimes to hang on to the suspension of disbelief and enjoy the show. You know if you're going to the Barnum circus you're going to get scammed, but you're getting the privilege of being scammed by the greatest show on earth.
This wasn't available in the country I grew up in, but I just loved every computer magazine I could lay my hands on. In particular I had (and still have) an Electronic Arts catalogue from I think 1987, with all their game title, descriptions and some screenshots. I used to read it back to back over and over again. There was a certain magic in all of this back then that is no longer around.
Same. I remember reading one copy of the Edmund Scientific catalog from cover to cover over and over again. Solar cells! Magnets! Fibre optics! Kites! Jumping discs disguised as quarters!
As far as I know, yes. The catalog is excellent as an optics ready-reference for useful formulae, optical and mechanical properties of materials, much more. They have their classic tutorial on old-school manual raytracing at
I grew up 10 minutes from Edmund Scientific. They had a retail store that was… amazing. The entrance had a real WW2 submarine periscope that kids played with. I’ll try to explain the Magic of this store, but really can’t do it justice.
The back room sold surplus scientific gadgets and parts, as well as military surplus (some WW2)… none of the back room stuff was in the catalog, so it was extra special to visit their store. You never knew what you’d find, like a WW2-era military oscilloscope for sale. Or surplus giant glass lenses to try to make your own telescope. Or black lights. Or gas masks, giant capacitors, random IC chips or transistors, unknown electronic devices in random boxes or wooden shelves that looked like your dad built them for the garage.
The front room was enormous and displayed everything in the catalog and possibly more. Everything could be touched and manipulated. Expensive items were in glass cases but clerks were happy to let you check them out.
The retail store is gone even though the successor company occupies the same building last I checked.
Any science-minded kid who grew up in South Jersey in the 60s, 70s, or 80s laments their closure, I guarantee that.
I appreciate your reminiscence. It is sad that places like this don't exist or are much fewer in number. They're like used bookstores where browsing to be surprised is part of the fun.
I would occasionally schlepp to an electronics surplus store in the San Fernando Valley to look around. Even when I didn't have a project in mind I would usually come up with something based on what I saw that day and would leave with the needed stuff. I checked their website just now and saw that they had closed permanently a few weeks ago after 50+ years.
As I got towards the end of the article, I was thinking of The Sharper Image--and there it was. DAK tickles something somewhere in my brain somewhere so I'm sure I saw it. There was a certain sub-genre in the days of print catalogs; SkyMall/Brookstone/Hammacher Schlemmer that were at least adjacent to this space which were probably more distinguished by their pitches than the actual products.
Clever product catalogs are their own delightful form of surreal-yet-real commercial art/literature.
They should bring back SkyMall as it really is just the sort of distraction you need on a typical flight.
Smartphones have taken over much of classic gadget functionality, and perhaps dimmed its magic. But I cannot help but be charmed by "Enter the Incredible New World of CD ROM" cover!! Techno-utopia is just a page turn (or product order) away!
Excuse me while I try to download and install Encarta 2009.
> Smartphones have taken over much of classic gadget functionality, and perhaps dimmed its magic.
Almost all gadget functionally, really. I was looking through a mid-1980's Radio Shack catalog. Just about everything in there can now be done by a phone instead. It is crazy and awesome when you think about it.
Camcorders, tape recorders, stereo systems, shortwave radios (now Internet streaming), TVs, VCRs, electronic weather gauges (just look up the current humidity now), computers, etc.
I learned a lot of electronics through their kits. Spring clips eliminated soldering, all the components were on the board and clearly labelled. The instruction manual's explanations were seriously written and at a pretty high level. It wasn't until late high school/early college that I had the background to understand them. In the meantime, I had a lot of fun with the suggested projects.
I used to have pretty much a whole bookshelf shelf at home of catalogs that arrived by the pound around Christmas. Even if my buying was usually with the boring clothing regulars pre-Web, it was entertainment. I buy less stuff generally, can better just search for stuff, and, as you say, smartphones have cut into the market for various single-purpose electronics.
Dak, in the days of dot matrix printers, marketed a horrible one in the computer mags that I simply had to have but now don't remember why. It used glass ampules filled with carbon as a print head, and a high voltage arc? to drag it to the page. It did work though, and I used it for my Atari systems at the time. Simply an odd product.
Sounds like the TRS-80 Screen Printer. A roll of aluminized paper was bent into an arc around a spinning drum with high-voltage wipers. Voltage pulses on the wipers would burn away the aluminum, revealing the dark background paper. Very fast, very strange.
Weird. 4 inches wide. Printed the contents of the screen and nothing else. Connected directly to the bus by an edge connector (no card or serial or parallel connection).
Blast from the past. I loved the catalogs as well and went down to the showroom in Canoga Park occasionally. Was near the Fry’s that I’d go to a decade later.
Lots of cool things, stereo and computers, but you’d not know what. Like Radio Shack and Trader Joe’s had a baby.
One of my favorite purchases was a huge 18” subwoofer cabinet with its own amp and… centimeter thick copper/gold tipped speaker cables! (Way before audiophile nonsense, they were cheap!)
Thing pounded the house down in the days of music from the TR-808.
A dozen or so years later got tired of moving it and put it on Craigslist, only one pair with a truck showed up and I was highly motivated to give it away for free. “Can always use for firewood if you don’t like it, “ I said.
Just realized I still have the cables, forgot where they came from until now. :-D
I bought some DAK products in the '80s. Always enjoyed the catalogs. When I moved to LA in '94, I wanted to make a pilgrimage of sorts to Canoga Park and see the place. That's when I learned they had been out of business for a couple of years.
I enjoyed looking through the DAK catalogs as a kid. At some point I developed into a bit of a snob and looked down at cheap stuff and DAK rubbed me the wrong way.
The Sharper Image on the other hand, woo! Cool things, expensive things. Really enjoyed those.
J. Peterman is notorious for its purple prose, it's kind of the opposite of DAK. Expensive stuff, trying to exude a sense of exclusivity. On the other hand it does have the same approach of a supposedly dedicated proprietor curating a particular kind of product for their customers.
I would really love to get a hold of some of the Calumet Photo catalogs from the early 90s. The zenith of analog cameras and processes all bound up in a super slick collection.
I recall the DAK ads from my teenage cheap subscription to Stereo Review magazine.
Bought a few things from him, like a cordless stereo headset. For that one I had to string an (included) thin insulated wire around my room - like an invisible fence! But it sounded good to me, and was inexpensive enough for a kid like me its day.
But my favorite sales pitch from DAK was for the Gorilla Banana printer, a super-cheap dot matrix parallel printer with a stupid name that made it ever more sellable - at least by Drew! Unfortunately I had no computer to buy it for...but I eventually found a couple of them in use in my business department's computer lab!
Contrast these with Radio Shack sales brochures. Radio Shack was fascinating, full of neat gadgets, but as dull as paste compared to the wonders of the DAK and Sharper Image catalogs (and we had a Sharper Image store in Seattle at that time...a great place to wander into at lunch time).
Radio Shack was this odd bifurcation of traditional "maker" stuff that, to be honest, in a pre-web world was better than nothing other than the rare local community and mostly low- to maybe mid-quality stereo etc. gear that mostly worked because "real" stereo stores intimidated a lot of people and they were more or less the only game in town for component cables at sane prices.
But, yes, they never adjusted their offerings or their marketing to make them more broadly appealing.
I had forgotten all about DAK! Thanks for the stroll down memory lane. I still have some of those cassettes stashed away somewhere. I can only imagine what's on them. ha!
I loved the DAK catalog. I would Google them every now and then to see what came of them. I remember buying an Equalizer and being obsessed over a subwoofer they were selling. I am pretty sure the tagline for that was "Krakatoa Erupts!". In college I got a roommate to buy a 286 from them. I remember it coming with this insane amount of DOS software. All the Borland stuff, DBASE etc.
Would be cool if these were all scanned and online somewhere.
I would also add the "Warehouse Sound" catalog from San Luis Obispo to the list - to this day I've never read such good ad copy. These guys could literally sell stereo systems to the deaf - the ad copy describing these systems back in the 70's was just that good.
I had a graphic EQ from DAK in the early 1990's. It was so neat to watch. Too bad it died after a couple years, it wouldn't save the EQ settings anymore after a power cycle.
There's my NEC Ultralite PC-17-02 in early spring '91! A friend bought one from DAK in '92 and sold it to me after he decided the box didn't have enough storage for him.
The funny thing is -- and I don't see it mentioned anywhere -- the hyperbole felt like something bordering on a scam as I grew older. I think it's one of those things where, as you grow up, you realize the way you read it literally as a naive kid is not the same way you read it as an adult, so you feel this strange disconnect between the promise being sold and what the product actually does.
Of course, I was never able to actually buy anything from DAK, but his writing truly drove my interest in technology.