[aa-jv]

You're Australian, didn't grow up on Dick Smith Fun Way kits .. but some German thingy sourced through Dads adventures instead?

Mate .. strewth! Hand in your Vegemite card, ocka!

Disclaimer: I had all the Fun Way books, all the beginner kits on crappy particle boards, the 'advanced' kits with PCB's and things, the soldering iron special bundle with all the books and a couple of kits .. but I still preferred hacking around with my Denshi blocks instead.. ;)

Denshi Blocks, oh boy are they great. Still got mine! It even has a synthesizer in it, ffs ..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denshi_block

Comparison with the spring kits:

https://kevinboone.me/denshi.html

[bigiain]

I also had those spring terminal type "100 in 1" kits. From memory Tandy ones though, not Dick Smith? I don't think Dick Smith stores stared appearing until I was in high school - maybe late 70s? By then I was onto having my own soldering iron and assembling PCB kits and later making my own PBCs with etch resist pens and ferric chloride.

"Adventuring Dad" was working for AWA at the time, deep in the military industrial complex and visiting military contractors and bases in the UK and Europe regularly.

[aa-jv]

Ah, yes I remember that the DSE kits were at first all mail order, which was an essential element to learning such things way out back in the bush, where I lived at the time .. had a HAM-radio afflicted uncle who delighted in giving me old electronics junk to disassemble and turn into working piles of components for our experiments, and his reward was to get on the ham and get some kits ordered for delivering at the local water hole. Wouldn't have had such a big leg up on life if I hadn't burned my fingers that way as a ripe 10 year old electronics engineering wannabe.

The 100 in 1 kits were fun, they could be wired up to basically anything, and for a few years my uncle had one semi-permanently wired in as a power rectifier for one of his experiments .. crazy times.