A little history

BCD Electro was founded in 1979 by Bob Harris Sr. on a card table in my parent’s living room. The original name was BCD Radio Parts Co., and was created to serve the amateur radio community. Dallas had an electronics flea market known as 1st Saturday that was held in the downtown area that was the primary source of income at first. BCD then went on the road to other electronic s flea markets around the country. I was traveling to 30 of these events per year at the peak of this era of the company. The “Big One” was in Dayton OH. And was a three day marathon of ham radio enthusiasts haggling over spending $.25 on a connector that cost $3.75 out of franchised distribution. There were thousands in attendance and the Dayton Hamvention is still going.
About 1981 I joined my mother and father in the BCD business after a stint in Dallas and later Austin in the music biz as a guitar maker and repair person, wow those were some fun times I wouldn’t trade for anything, but I was a single father and really needed to start making some money. We had a mail order catalog then also that a good friend in the business let us use (thanks Billy). My Dad left the business in 1987 after finding a new interest in estate jewelry and I moved the catalog from a paste up to electronic version via Pagemaker software. This was a 6 month long process of many 12 and 14 hour days on a 20 MHz 286 computer. We put out about a half a dozen of those catalogs, and at first, they would bring a lot of orders, but after a couple of years the orders were dropping quite precipitously. Ham radio was moving away from the do-it-yourselfer to the you-can-buy-it-cheaper-than-you-can-build-it-er.
We abandoned the catalog business and auctioned the catalog inventory to begin buying and selling excess and surplus electronic components, mainly semiconductor materials. There was always the “what the %#@ is this” aspect of this, especially when we were working with TI missiles and aerospace from the old county store in the main TI plant at Central and IH 635. This kept things interesting and challenging as there was always something new to sell and/or recycle. The recycling aspect of the business was always there in the EOL and the yet to be coined PLM (product lifecycle management) business.
BCD has now moved the recycling aspect of the business to a more prominent position in the company with all the greens, RoHs and WEEEs that have emerged in the last few years. We are working with hospitals for medical equipment, as well as many other types of businesses for environmentally sound disposal of IT, networking telecomm and other industrial electronics. We are keeping disk drive data from leaking into the hands of data pirates by destruction and erasing to military specifications.
Semiconductor sales is still our main income and specialty.