PHOTO: Walt Shawlee III

Walter Shawlee II received this poster of a Faber-Castell 2/83N slide rule as a gift from a fellow collector

From the outside there is little to distinguish the Shawlee family residence from the other homes overlooking Lake Okanagan in the southern British Columbia town of Kelowna, in Canada. But inside it’s another world. From here, Walter Shawlee II runs a rather unusual—and successful—operation selling used electronic test equipment and parts through his vast and colorful Web site (http://www.sphere.bc.ca) to customers all over the world.

Looking for that good old analog oscilloscope that was your benchwork companion back in the days of electronics class? Or perhaps that sturdy multimeter that you carried with you everywhere but is now long discontinued? Chances are you’ll find those at Shawlee’s virtual electronics warehouse, along with power supplies, frequency counters, signal generators, transformers, photomultipliers, high-voltage rectifiers, and a plethora of spare parts—vacuum tubes, Nixie tubes, Numitrons, cathode ray tubes, fuses, relays, and integrated circuits, including “obscure, obsolete, and military ICs.”

The Web site is also the gateway to the self-proclaimed “Slide Rule Universe.” Yes, Shawlee has slide rules, too. Tons of them. There are full-size units, pocket varieties, circular models, and a sleek US $195 Seiko Analog Quartz “slide rule wristwatch.” “Keep in mind,” the Web site says, “in 50 years, the computer you are using to view this Web page will be landfill, but your trusty slide rule will just be nicely broken in!”

Shawlee, a former UCLA electronics engineering and math major who left the university before completing his degree, is passionate in his disdain for most modern test equipment and determined to salvage what he can from the past. “Everyone else is busy cranking these things out that are destined to be tossed,” he told me when I visited in August. “We’re interested in the things that are too good to throw away.”

As we toured his house, we walked through rooms that had become overhaul laboratories, their workbenches crowded with equipment that was in the process of being refurbished and calibrated. Scalar analyzers nudged up against multimode counters. Function generators hid behind power meters. It looked more chaotic than usual, Shawlee explained, because his most recent work-term student had just returned to college, leaving him with only one employee to help with the technical side of things.

“I know my wife would like to get her dining room back soon,” Shawlee says, but he admits that the last time that happened was two or three years ago.