9 ms·

Dick Smith (Entrepreneur)

90 points by wglb 5y ago

sossles 5y 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 5y 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.
vosper 5y 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.
bitwize 5y 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 5y ago
  He also marketted an alternative to "Redhead" matches which he called "Dickheads".
  - __d 5y ago
    IIRC, the tagline for some of his advertising was "The Electronic Dick". Different times.
ravenstine 5y 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.
- Taniwha 5y ago
  Yeah Disk Smith came in to NZ and replaced a perfectly good electronics parts wholesaler with over priced retail crud
  - jsmeaton 5y 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.
    - Taniwha 5y ago
      I'm talking about what happened in the 80s
      - Reason077 5y ago
        Care to elaborate? I’m not old enough to remember much before the mid-to-late 80s, but I remember my local NZ Dick Smith Electronics being a pretty cool and wondrous place back then.
  - tuatoru 5y 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.)
    - Taniwha 5y ago
desertraven 5y 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.
- neurotech1 5y 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.
  - desertraven 5y ago
    Wholeheartedly agree. Your comment gives me Aussie vibes, yet it looks like you’re in the US. Did you relocate?
    - neurotech1 5y ago
      Yes. In the US now.
  - siquick 5y ago
    Ironically the Dick Smiths brand is now owned by Kogan who specialise in importing and selling grey market goods in Australia.
    - nikau 5y ago
      > Ironically the Dick Smiths brand is now owned by Kogan who specialise in importing and selling grey market goods in Australia. Bit ironic to make a fortune importing shit from HK in the 80s, then selling off your name and face as a brand, and then complaining about people not buying Australian.
t0mas88 5y 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.
curl_e 5y ago
I learned electronics from https://archive.org/details/dicksmithsfunwayintoelectronicsvolume2 https://archive.org/details/dicksmithsfunwayintoelectronicsv... pasting the circuit diagram on to a block of wood and screwing down the components...
- jeremycarter 5y ago
  Fond memories
schappim 5y 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-fools-pranks-the-day-an-iceberg-floated-past-the-opera-house/news-story/592efb3e982c8cb43748fd2564dc524d https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/sydney-april-fool...
- nsajko 5y ago
  There are (disappointing) photographs here: http://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/the_sydney_iceberg/ http://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/the_sydney_iceberg/
schappim 5y 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.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
Yeahh I used to go to the shop in Sydney. But when I was there it already wasn't owned by him anymore.
throwawaylinux 5y 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.
- ggm 5y 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)
  - dools 5y 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.
    - Reason077 5y ago
      We know we could colonise the center of Australia (or the center of Antarctica for that matter), if we really wanted to. What makes Mars interesting is that it’s hard. Nobody is arguing that we should go to Mars because it is easy!
rasz 5y ago
Tricky Dicks! 'Dick Smith Electronics - A conversation with Dick Smith' from 2010 for State of Electronics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVQTZluvrUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVQTZluvrUs
harry8 5y 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.principleadvisory.com/press/2006/brw_aug_bloodsweatink.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20110715112957/http://www.princi...
kripy 5y 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-private-equity-heist-of-all-time/ https://foragerfunds.com/news/dick-smith-is-the-greatest-pri...
jdub 5y 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 5y ago
>Dick Smith 'I won the lottery of life' https://www.pressreader.com/australia/the-australian-womens-weekly/20211104/282445647266905 https://www.pressreader.com/australia/the-australian-womens-...

90 points by wglb 5y 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 5y 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.

vosper 5y 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.

bitwize 5y 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 5y ago
He also marketted an alternative to "Redhead" matches which he called "Dickheads".
- __d 5y ago
  IIRC, the tagline for some of his advertising was "The Electronic Dick". Different times.

ravenstine 5y 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.

Taniwha 5y ago
Yeah Disk Smith came in to NZ and replaced a perfectly good electronics parts wholesaler with over priced retail crud
- jsmeaton 5y 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.
  - Taniwha 5y ago
    I'm talking about what happened in the 80s
    - Reason077 5y ago
      Care to elaborate? I’m not old enough to remember much before the mid-to-late 80s, but I remember my local NZ Dick Smith Electronics being a pretty cool and wondrous place back then.
- tuatoru 5y 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.)
  - Taniwha 5y ago

desertraven 5y 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.

neurotech1 5y 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.
- desertraven 5y ago
  Wholeheartedly agree. Your comment gives me Aussie vibes, yet it looks like you’re in the US. Did you relocate?
  - neurotech1 5y ago
    Yes. In the US now.
- siquick 5y ago
  Ironically the Dick Smiths brand is now owned by Kogan who specialise in importing and selling grey market goods in Australia.
  - nikau 5y ago
    > Ironically the Dick Smiths brand is now owned by Kogan who specialise in importing and selling grey market goods in Australia. Bit ironic to make a fortune importing shit from HK in the 80s, then selling off your name and face as a brand, and then complaining about people not buying Australian.

t0mas88 5y 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.

curl_e 5y ago

I learned electronics from https://archive.org/details/dicksmithsfunwayintoelectronicsvolume2 https://archive.org/details/dicksmithsfunwayintoelectronicsv... pasting the circuit diagram on to a block of wood and screwing down the components...

jeremycarter 5y ago
Fond memories

schappim 5y 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-fools-pranks-the-day-an-iceberg-floated-past-the-opera-house/news-story/592efb3e982c8cb43748fd2564dc524d https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/sydney-april-fool...

nsajko 5y ago
There are (disappointing) photographs here: http://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/the_sydney_iceberg/ http://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/the_sydney_iceberg/

schappim 5y 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.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

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

throwawaylinux 5y 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.

ggm 5y 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)
- dools 5y 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.
  - Reason077 5y ago
    We know we could colonise the center of Australia (or the center of Antarctica for that matter), if we really wanted to. What makes Mars interesting is that it’s hard. Nobody is arguing that we should go to Mars because it is easy!

rasz 5y ago

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

harry8 5y 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.principleadvisory.com/press/2006/brw_aug_bloodsweatink.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20110715112957/http://www.princi...

kripy 5y 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-private-equity-heist-of-all-time/ https://foragerfunds.com/news/dick-smith-is-the-greatest-pri...

jdub 5y 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 5y ago

>Dick Smith 'I won the lottery of life' https://www.pressreader.com/australia/the-australian-womens-weekly/20211104/282445647266905 https://www.pressreader.com/australia/the-australian-womens-...