Dick Smith (Entrepreneur)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Smith_(entrepreneur)

by wglb • 5 years ago

90 96 5 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

bitwize• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

He also marketted an alternative to "Redhead" matches which he called "Dickheads".

__d2• 5 years ago

IIRC, the tagline for some of his advertising was "The Electronic Dick". Different times.

ravenstine2• 5 years ago

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.

barbs• 5 years ago

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.

Taniwha3• 5 years ago

Yeah Disk Smith came in to NZ and replaced a perfectly good electronics parts wholesaler with over priced retail crud

jsmeaton• 5 years ago

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.

tuatoru• 5 years ago

replaced a perfectly good electronics parts wholesaler

David Reid? Radio Spares? (There was another with a name that started with T, but it's slipped my mind.)

flog• 5 years ago

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.

ravenstine2• 5 years ago

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.

sundvor• 5 years ago

As a Norwegian expat in Melbourne since early 2000s I'd somewhat equal the DSE experience to Frithjof Arngren in Norway in the late 70s/80s (for any Norwegians lurking around here).

I never got to Arngen's stores, if any, but those printed catalogues were truly amazing experiences of full on geek.

There were a lot of design similarities to Dick Smith ie the prominently featured hand drawn heads.

Today I see he has a website in his name, which is ... unique. I have no better way to describe it.

cmroanirgo• 5 years ago

In the early days DSE was like jaycar. An electronics store with kits and diy computers. Dick sold it off years ago. The stores are part of Kogan now (importing and flogging chinese stuff).

Tehdasi• 5 years ago

"In the early days DSE was like Jaycar." Not that surprising. The origin story of Jaycar is that when DSE was being sold to Woolworths DS took aside an exec at DSE and said that Woolworths were going to run DSE into the ground. He advised the exec to start up his own rival chain, which he did, and thus Jaycar. Still, whilst Jaycar appears to be quite successful, DS wasn't entirely right, it took 34 years for the brand to die.

desertraven2• 5 years ago

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.

neurotech12• 5 years ago

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.

desertraven2• 5 years ago

Wholeheartedly agree. Your comment gives me Aussie vibes, yet it looks like you’re in the US. Did you relocate?

jacquesm• 5 years ago

It should be everywhere in the world, not just in Australia. But that ship has quite literally sailed and we buy stuff from all over the world for a fraction of what it would cost to produce locally. If you want to reverse that expect to pay a very large multiple of what you are paying today for goods.

siquick2• 5 years ago

Ironically the Dick Smiths brand is now owned by Kogan who specialise in importing and selling grey market goods in Australia.

Grimburger2• 5 years ago

locally made, locally owned

Why exactly? Can you elucidate on this viewpoint. Australia has a huge proportion of dirty coalfired power so anything energy intensive would be better produced elsewhere, Australian emissions per capita are among the highest in the world, so supporting more workers is again a bad argument, the world needs far less Australians given their rate of consumption.

Does it simply just boil down to stonecold nationalism?

lotophage• 5 years ago

His peanut butter was always known as "Dick's nut butter" amongst my friends.

naruhodo• 5 years ago

In a similar vein, his "Dick Smith Electronics" stores were known as "The Big Electronic Dick".

joeman1000• 5 years ago

That peanut butter is sorely missed. There’s no good replacement for it on supermarket shelves yet.

t0mas88• 5 years ago

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.

vosper• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

I learned electronics from

https://archive.org/details/dicksmithsfunwayintoelectronicsv...

pasting the circuit diagram on to a block of wood and screwing down the components...

jeremycarter• 5 years ago

Fond memories

schappim2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

There are (disappointing) photographs here: http://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/the_sydney_iceberg/

schappim2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

fmakunbound• 5 years ago

I recall the Fun Way series book fondly. As a kid, I did the kits over and over (even unsoldering the PCB kits from the later books after soldering them together). I probably breathed in too much leaded solder vapors, but it’s what put me on the path to electrical and computer engineering.

GekkePrutser3• 5 years ago

Yeahh I used to go to the shop in Sydney. But when I was there it already wasn't owned by him anymore.

throwawaylinux6• 5 years ago

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.

ggm3• 5 years ago

The historical uses of this line of reasoning are plain to see: it has been used to justify racial theory, eugenics, sterilisation of the mentally deficient.

I believe I understand how strongly some environmentalists believe lower population is "the answer" especially in an Australian context of concern about water and carrying capacity of an overwhelmingly arid landscape. This isn't a random belief, it's grounded in some simple economics about the environment. I just think it's usually over simplified, and lacks rigour.

The problem is that the historical associations to racism have to be confronted. And they rarely are. Oddly, the same people who push this small carrying capacity line often also oppose Gates and others working to improve access to contraception and abortion. Perhaps the Indian emergency under Indira Gandhi and the Chinese mass sterilisation campaigns left "scars" of concern.

Dick Smith didn't do enough to distance himself from Pauline Hanson.

(I am not a small Australia believer btw. Even noting the above we could have environmentally acceptable 50m population here)

dools6• 5 years ago

If we are doing our fair share by land mass it should be 500m by 2050.

I find it astonishing that people have an easier time believing we can colonise Mars than that we can colonise the centre of Australia.

throwawaylinux6• 5 years ago

The earth is already beyond the sustainable carrying capacity of humans. We have exterminated thousands of species and that's mostly without the effect of climate change. And that's just now, not even if we had everyone on earth with the living standards of an Australian or German or American.

Australia is already "big Australia", Australia's record on habitat and species destruction is horrific. It just astounds me that people would think doubling the population of western countries (or any country) would be a good idea.

I don't buy the "eugenics" equivalence, any more than you can connect any sort of policy or technology to genocide if you tried hard enough. By advocating for massive populations you are implicitly advocating for tiered class system of haves and have-nots in my opinion.

dools6• 5 years ago

The population will reach 11b and level off in 2050.

ggm3• 5 years ago

Might disagree about the 11b but yes, the 2nd order differential on the rate of population growth strongly suggests we're capping out.

Economics reduces birthrate as fast as anything else.

twelvechairs2• 5 years ago

I like the man generally but disagree with his views on hard immigration caps for Australia. I agree population is a major sustainability issue but find these caps far too elitist and authoritarian - while it just pushes the same issues elsewhere globally.

Though nobody should be judged on one view alone. Everyone has their failures and blindspots

throwawaylinux6• 5 years ago

Harvesting 21st century's most valuable resource -- the best and brightest people -- from disadvantaged countries is horrific. It's colonialism, in my opinion.

I'm always astounded by people in rich western countries boasting about how they poached all this talent from some of the poorest countries on earth. Like, yeah that's great you got another doctor for your healthcare system that spends billions of dollars extending people's lives by a few months. Guess that country she came from where children regularly die of easily preventable diseases won't miss her. So long as we don't have to wait more than 10 minutes for an ambulance when we have a boo-boo and get to see a doctor immediately at the ER f- everybody else.

Though as you say, I don't judge everyone purely based on that greed and selfishness. They all have their failures and blind spots.

monkeycantype• 5 years ago

There’s a messy conflict between different ideals and agendas in Australia’s immigration debate that will be familiar to people in other countries too. Immigrants have made modern Australia, and progressive people want them to feel welcome and their achievements recognized, and want to be open to their families and to refugees, but at the same time immigration is used as an economic lever to lower wages and conditions, and having large numbers of people working with fragile visa statuses is corrosive for democracy, there’s no clean path through this.

MarkMc• 5 years ago

Immigrants generally increase their income, and income is inversely correlated with birth rate.

So wouldn't a high level of Australian immigration reduce the total world population, relative to a low immigration level?

Grimburger2• 5 years ago

The traditional environmental and green parties in Australia really can't handle the immigration issue, it's very taboo to talk about with these groups because they somehow associate it with racism (despite the UK and US making up a huge amount of Australian permanent migration). The Greens simply won't discuss it despite being the elephant in the room regarding habitat loss and increasing emissions.

Dick is easy to write off as just another "old racist white guy" but his arguments were all environmental based, the guy cares a lot about the natural world and conservation.

rasz• 5 years ago

Tricky Dicks!

'Dick Smith Electronics - A conversation with Dick Smith' from 2010 for State of Electronics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVQTZluvrUs

harry8• 5 years ago

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. [1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110715112957/http://www.princi...

kripy• 5 years ago

Not about the man so much but about the business he built up and then sold, Dick Smith is the Greatest Private Equity Heist of All Time [1] is a wild read into Australian private equity.

[1] https://foragerfunds.com/news/dick-smith-is-the-greatest-pri...

jdub• 5 years ago

Just don't believe any web ads featuring his name or image – all scams. He must be comfortably offline and in blissful ignorance. Imagine.

bookofjoe• 5 years ago

Dick Smith 'I won the lottery of life' https://www.pressreader.com/australia/the-australian-womens-...

Dick Smith (Entrepreneur)

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