Electronics surplus in Toronto was synonymous with Active Surplus on Queen Street for many years. The large, cluttered building with the ape standing outside has been one of my favorite nerd-friendly shopping destinations since high school.
But they've gone and cleaned it up. How sad.
They've also moved it down the street and up to the second floor. The ape still stands out front, and there's even a fellow hawking flyers for the new location. Yet I still had trouble finding the place. I walked back and forth in front of it twice before spotting it. That doesn't bode well for their foot traffic.
Okay, I'll grant that I'm nearsighted and prone to getting lost, but still I think this place is too non-obvious.
The new digs are not nearly as fun as the old ones. It's too brightly lit for one thing, and too well organized by half. But worst of all is there is simply too little stuff.
Oh, there are still lots of boxes full of plastic funnels, chess pieces and paint rollers. But the new location is woefully under stocked when it comes to the stuff that made Active Surplus famous: the strange cable adaptors, esoteric circuit boards, and rare computer hardware.
Active Surplus is now a place to find a cheap harness for your pet instead of a cheap hard drive for your PET, and that's really too bad.
Luckily, some of the people who used to work at Active have opened another surplus shop up on Bloor St. just west of Bathurst. It's called Above All Surplus, and although it's much smaller than Active it's far more in keeping with the old Active feel.
My trip down to Active left me empty handed, but I came away from Above All with the cables I'll need to fashion a null modem, plus a box of 5.25" floppy disks for my Apple IIe (about $10 total).
The floppies are big news for me. Sure, you Windows users have probably had boxes of them nearby all along, right there on the shelf beside your boxes of anti-virus software and your long list of tech support telephone numbers. But as a Mac user I haven't had a computer with any kind of floppy drive for about six years.
It was fun formatting my first floppy disks in half a decade. I took a photo, because I'm a nerd.
Oh gosh, I'm such a nerd.
Tomorrow I'll try to post something that interests normal people like television or girls or cars, I promise.
