
Polycom’s co-founder on the best investment he ever made - steven
https://backchannel.com/how-i-founded-a-2-billion-dollar-company-with-a-95-cent-book-from-radioshack-8143e0d9607d
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gvb
The quote about Woz using a TRS-80 for phone phreaking is a misquote of the
referenced Wireless article. I'm sure the "one" that Woz bought was a touch
tone dialer, not a TRS-80.

 _Read about the biggest tech stories of the 20th century, and RadioShack
keeps popping up: Long before he founded Netscape, Marc Andreessen learned to
program tooling around on a TRS-80, one of the first affordable personal
computers and one of the first devices RadioShack ever produced. Kevin
Mitnick, the first hacker ever on the FBI’s most-wanted list, learned his
trade on the demo models at RadioShack because he couldn’t afford a computer
of his own. John Draper, the phone phreaker known as “Captain Crunch,” hacked
his way into free long-distance calls using a Touch Tone dialer he bought from
RadioShack._

 _Woz bought one too, and he says it cost him a fortune. He used it for the
now-infamous Blue Box, which he and Steve Jobs used to make their own free
calls without interference from Ma Bell. Without RadioShack, there’s no Blue
Box. And as Woz tells it, without the Blue Box there’s no Apple._

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coreyp_1
I'm sad to see Radio Shack so far from the "builders" market.

I had to run to RS this weekend to try to find a part, only to find 3
salespeople who had no idea of how components or soldering worked. They seemed
amazed that I would actually design my own circuits, while I look at what I am
doing and consider it to be a bit amateurish. :(

~~~
jey
You could move to Berkeley, where we still have Al Lasher's Electronics right
in downtown with knowledgeable staff.

~~~
StavrosK
The main problem is that, if the staff know about how to design circuits, why
are they working at an electronics store?

~~~
nitrogen
Commission? Or maybe it's just a hobby?

~~~
michaelt
I can't imagine there's much commission to be made selling a Raspberry Pi :)

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bm1362
Never thought I'd see Polycom on HN. Interned for 2 complete years at Polycom,
mainly writing internal tools and doing random IT work. I had little oversight
and was free to use any framework/language to solve a variety of problems -- I
ended up teaching myself a ton of stuff which led to freelance gigs. Lots of
cool older engineers, but I got the feeling the culture was dying off.

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sverige
These things are great devices and very functional. Still, I curse these guys
since they enabled people to waste countless hours of my time over the years
on ridiculous conference calls that would have been better handled by . . .
email.

Oh wait, I hate email too.

But I loved the old Radio Shack. On a tangential note, Tandy Leather Co. took
a precipitous dive as well. Where have all the makers gone, whether of
circuits or leather things?

~~~
breakingcups
Maybe you just hate how people communicate regardless of medium?

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pcunite
The book shown in the article was authored by Robert G. Middleton.

Link:
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000IDA7ZC/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000IDA7ZC/)

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bluedino
>> Working from those insights, we built our first physical model in a single
weekend using plastic panels from the hobby shop, hot glue, and an off-the-
shelf paper-cone speaker.

Who needs a 3D printer?

~~~
hibbelig
In the early nineties they didn't have one.

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beachstartup
we have an original polycom soundstation on our conference table. it still
works fine.

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newman314
I love my Polycom Soundstation.

I only wish I could figure out how to get SSL certs properly loaded onto the
phone. Spent multiple hours trying with no success. =(

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6stringmerc
Took me a while to see where the article was going, and was plenty surprised
to see...that thing...the conference room speakerphone that was, in my
experience, somewhere between barely functional and purposefully infuriating.
I do not have a high opinion of the product after using it. Much like Bose.
Hooray for making a lot of money, Monster Cables & Beats headphones style
though.

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mankash666
By that measure, lots of successful companies have been founded with
information from the internet. If said information was obtained from the
public library, was the initial investment ~$0?

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thelazydogsback
"[book] gave us the secret ... sealed enclosure created two separate acoustic
environments ... one inside the speaker enclosure ... and one outside, where
the microphones were"

I would have thought that part of the design would have been self-evident?

As a TRS-80 owner starting in 1979 I also morn the loss of the
inventor/creator version of Radio Shack - hung out there often walking back
from school and many started learning BASIC programming (which at the time
included hand-assembling Z-80 code in read/data statements and POKEing them
in) in the store.

~~~
dsr_
There are a lot of speaker designs. To begin with: how much power do you have
available? If you need to depend on the power from the phone line, you need a
very efficient speaker -- a horn design, most likely. If you have an external
power source, you get a better amplifier, and you can use a less efficient
dynamic speaker. What do you put it in? You can leave it unsealed; you can
port it carefully; you can seal it in a box -- but what size box?

Turns out that the characteristics of the speaker and the size of the box
together determine the performance of the speaker.

~~~
thelazydogsback
And, if they did hang out at Radio Shack, they would have come across the
venerable Minimus-7 - one of the first examples ever of a high-performing
micro speaker with a sealed-enclosure design, that still stands up to the test
of time.

[http://www.retrothing.com/2011/06/minimus-
speaker.html](http://www.retrothing.com/2011/06/minimus-speaker.html)

