#heathkit

Moon 31.8: Forced socialization be upon ye angry child

Fun old tech on display or for sale at the Winter 2026 Dallas/Fort Worth area Retrocomputing Meeup on the 17th of January, 2026.

Heathkit H89 and 3D Printed H8 case - Darrell Pelan, Joe Travis, Glenn Roberts, Evelyn Pelan

let me tell you something.

my first computer was a Timex Sinclair I bought from Sears for $99. (81 or 82) it stored programs on a cassette tape. you'd sit there listening to the squeal and warble coming off the tape hoping it didn't corrupt halfway through.

before that I was breadboarding circuits and wire wrapping connections just to see if something I built would actually work.

I am a hobbyist. a tinkerer. not a professional developer. I'm talking to the people like me.

every generation has its version of this fight.

📷 cameras — "you didn't paint it, it doesn't count"

⌨️ word processors — "spell check is making you lazy"

🔢 calculators — "you won't always have one available"

(I worked on the manufacturing floor at Texas Instruments after I got out of the Army. I know how calculators are built. that doesn't mean everyone who uses one needs to know that.)

and now:

🤖 vibe coding — "you're not a real programmer"

same argument. every single time. the gatekeepers always lose.

vibe coding is the Heathkit of software.

Heathkit didn't make electronics simpler — it changed the interface. their manuals didn't explain capacitor physics. they told you where to put it. hobbyists built real things without needing an engineering degree first.

nobody called them cheaters.

vibe coding does the same thing for software. the AI is your breadboard. the prompt is your wire wrap tool.

it's four steps:

describe what you want to build

paste into a free AI (ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek)

run the code

change one thing and see what happens

that last step is where the learning lives. that's tinkering.

I'm not saying it'll make you rich. I'm not saying it replaces real developers.

I'm saying the hobbyist who just wants to build something that scratches their own itch finally has a way in.

the tinkerers always find a way.

18 free lessons → gregthevibecoder.com Kindle book (free on KU) → amazon.com/dp/B0GX2TGD7Q YouTube → @learnvibecodingnow Everything → linktr.ee/gregthevibecoder

Heathkit catalog illustration

That's it. 3+ years of work into 8 photos.

Project Purple Heart is FINALLY done! This is 2 Heathkit mono amplifiers that I bought 9 years ago at an antique radio swap meet. One of them I misdiagnosed as having a bad power transformer. In my overzealous and undereducated state, I threw it away.

This left me with 2 amps... but one power transformer. The stock transformer wasn't capable of driving both amplifiers, so I designed a custom power supply using a military 5R4 rectifier tube (pictures 7&8 sticking out of the top) that I had on hand. This essentially functions as a stereo amp now. Each Heathkit carries one channel.

The enclosure is made of cedar and cut in a waterfall style where the grain follows the 90deg angle of the wood. I used a red jewel light as the power indicator. This project stretched me in every aspect of my creative building. From woodworking, to 3D printing, to electrical design and troubleshooting, this was a beast.

I called it Purple Heart for the exotic wood which looks beautiful but is PAINFUL to work with. This project fought me the whole way, but I'm very proud of how it turned out!