Times are changing at Spink Tech, 29 Millgate, Arbroath.
As of Monday 18th of May 2026 we are making some changes at Spink Tech. Specifically, we are ending our retail operation and moving to a “workshop” model. This means the shop will no longer have any regular opening hours and visiting will be by appointment.
I’ve covered this change in summary various place already. But for those interested I thought I would go in to some of the history and details!
Before we go backwards, a quick mention of the future. Although drop-in retail is ending we can still provide all the same services as before including supply and install of new equipment, repair of desktop and laptop devices, and troubleshooting various “techie” problems, we just need to discuss and arrange that service with you first – which is mostly how we deal with things anyway.
It’s also worth mentioning there are absolutely no changes to the services we provide to organisations. This is purely a retail adjustment.
What’s the story with the retail shop? Well, the short version is that retail (and by retail I mean people coming in off the street looking for help or to make a purchase) is no longer viable. The fact is people just don’t shop the way they way they did. Look at the newspaper cutting above – it’s a young me from February 1993 when I started the business. That’s 33 year ago – over a year before Amazon was founded, over 2 years before eBay, and 7 years before broadband internet! At that time the first mobile phone that you’d maybe recognise, the Nokia 1011, has only just been released. There was no internet shopping, there was hardly even internet!
If you wanted to buy something you’d pop to a local shop, or see something advertised in a magazine. If you wanted the item in the magazine you’d phone up and give your card payment details – or more usually send a cheque in the post along with your order details and keep your fingers crossed.
When we first started accepting credit card payments it was done manually by filling out a slip, taking the customers card, and running the card and slip through a manually operated machine that took an imprint of the embossed card details. Anything over a certain value (called the floor limit) we had to telephone the bank and read out all the details of the transaction to hopefully get an authorisation code. The slips then had to be taken to the bank, a bit like a cheque.
People shop differently now, everyone has a super-computer in their pocket, everyone can do a quick internet search and find any item you’d care to mention, pay for it with a couple of taps, AND have it delivered to their door the next day (or sooner!). Don’t get me wrong, there are many people who value, and want, local personal service. There just aren’t enough of them for us to justify having a staffed retail outlet. So we are going to adapt to this change.
I had been a computer geek long before the term, and had enjoyed my Grandstand Video console, followed by a Commodore 64 computer – at a time when many of my friends were starting out with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I think secretly they knew the CBM64 was superior!
It wasn’t long before my Commodore 64 was joined by an Amiga 500 – also by Commodore and vastly improved!
By the early 1990s my interest in computers and especially the online community called Compunet (like an early internet) had let me to make friends from different parts of the country and I would go on to meet the owner, staff, and original developers of that system in London over many trips away. A friend and I started developing software for Compunet although, sadly, that was ultimately curtailed by the closure of the service – a story for another day!
By 1992 I knew opening a “Computer Shop”, something which didn’t exist in Arbroath at the time, was what I wanted to do.
I can recall making an appointment at the Job Centre to discuss my idea. The very first meeting was with an enthusiastic advisor from Angus Enterprise Trust called Laurie Smith. I have said to Laurie on many occasions since that his positive response and encouragement were instrumental in my decision to see the idea though.
With support from family, and my Dad taking time off from his own work to come and basically build the inside of the shop for me, I was good to go by February 1993 in a rented shop at 34 Keptie Street.
The picture here is undated, but in the very early days. On opening day we had Sega consoles (Master System, and Mega Drive) and the Amiga 1200 and 600 for sale – along with a selection of joysticks, games, and blank disks. At this stage it really was just gaming systems.. PC systems existed but were not of much interest to home users. A flood of school children would come in to the shop at “home time”, so much so the lollypop lady did occasionally appear to chase them out!
The first few years were quite a whirlwind, with a rapid expansion of the business. It wasn’t long before the PC style system began to gain popularity and we became proficient at specifying and assembling them. The revolution of Windows 95 was just about to transform the Personal Computer, just before that we were working with Windows 3.11 and systems with 1 or 2MB of memory, and perhaps 100MB storage. Once Windows 95 launched things progressed rapidly. It is difficult to comprehend the progress between then and now with the phone in your pocket being vastly more powerful than these systems! A very average laptop computer these days would easily have 512,000MB (i.e. 512GB)storage and 16,000MB (i.e. 16GB) of memory. The advances in processing speed are hard to quantify – but it’s an orders of magnitude improvement.
Although gaming systems such as the Sony Play Station and Nintendo 64 were still successful for us it was clear what the future direction was. In 1996 we started a relationship with Angus College and became their sole supplier of computers – for many years we helped them refresh a great number of computers every summer. We also supplied all the PC systems for their new Abbey Campus building in 2004.
The business from Angus College allowed us to move out of our rented shop to a new location at 29 Millgate. This shop was previously that of Iain White the photographer, I purchased it from his son Colin.
We were so busy with college orders that we starting using the new space immediately, even while the construction work on the new retail area was still underway.
Again my Dad took time away from his own work to single handily fit out our new shop like he’d done with the first a few years before.
The shop opened in mid 1996 and has been the home of the business ever since.
As the new millennium approached we continued to be very busy building computers while at the same time a decision was made to move away from our beginnings by ending the sale of gaming consoles and games. PCs were becoming dominant, and business support was becoming a larger part of the business. This was hastened by the decline of the Amiga brand and the failure of various attempts to resurrect it.
We were very grateful to be able to work with Angus College for a number of years. The fit-out of their new Arbroath campus building in 2004 was the pinnacle of that relationship. Very shortly after this install modern day “flat panel” monitors became the norm taking over from these gigantic CRT screens. When we were fitting out the college building the lifts of the three story structure had not yet been commissioned so we individually lifted each of these screen to the 1st and 2nd floors! The year prior to this Microsoft had released Windows XP.
In 2010 we assisted with supply and setup of a publicly accessible webcam for Angus Council in the Glen Clova area. This involved sourcing the camera and software to provide the public access and liaising with the electrician and landowner to make it all happen. The camera ran successfully for many years until the barn it was on was redeveloped and it had to be decommissioned.
By the 2007 the iPhone had launched, and Microsoft had released Windows Vista. Technology by this stage was still advancing at pace, however it was more of an evolution than the revolution of the earlier days. Tech from this period would still be easily recognisable today.
Coming back to the retail side of things, as the story approaches the current day, we experimented with reducing the opening hours of the shop.
The commercial side of the business was increasingly subsidising the retail operation.
Although the business was renamed as Spink Tech Ltd in 2015 we initially kept the ZigZak name for the shop as people were familiar with it. Incidentally I am often asked the origin of that name. It’s actually an unintentional misspelling of ZikZak which was the name of a fictional company in the Max Headroom TV series. The name of the business actually predates the shop and was used by a friend and I for a different business in the very early 1990s.
In very recent years ZigZak was eventually dropped and everything became known as Spink Tech. The name better reflects our activities today.
Many will recognise Louise from our shop counter, many will also know she is my wife. Louise kindly agreed to assist me in the shop for “a few days” over 12 years ago! She has decided to pursue her own ventures now and I fully support her in that.
That decision prompted us to have a fresh look at the future direction of the business. The conclusion was that a full time retail operation is not a sustainable option for us anymore. In fact we had looked at the options regularly over the last few years, as any prudent business would, and it has always been a borderline decision to continue as was.
As mentioned at the begining of this article we are very much not stepping away from the business, but the form is evolving as has always been the case.
David.
