You are right, we live in the golden age of electronics prototyping. I'll throw in plugs for the Octopart search engine for finding parts, and PCBEX for inexpensive prototype boards up to ten layers.
100 years ago, yesterday, was the worst hard rock mining disaster in the US, in Butte, Montana. They didn't have this way of warning the miners back then and 168 miners died due to a fire in one of the shafts. Most died from asphyxia.
Michael Punke, the author of the Revenant, wrote an excellent non-fiction book about it called "Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917".
The original post may have been intended for a select audience that would be familiar with the context, so that author may be forgiven, but the person that submitted the post should have kept in mind the much wider audience here.
As a hardware engineer, ETL is a NRTL that competes with UL and CSA. Oh, excuse me, Thomas Edison's Electrical Testing Labs is a Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratory that competes with Underwriters Laboratories and the Canadian Standards Association.
As a Geezer Geek, this breaks my heart. When I was eight years old, my mom dragged me along to the Tandy Leather Company so my sister could buy some leather for some stupid project. In the corner of that huge store was a section with all kinds of electronic parts. I was fascinated. My mom bought me a crystal radio kit, some books and a CK722 germanium transistor, and later, an Ocean Hopper shortwave receiver (all of which I still have).
For another generation, it will be the TRS-80 that was their first love, electronically speaking.
Before they lost their way, Radio Shack started a lot of engineers down their career path and it is very sad to see this outcome.
http://quadstick.com is developing a mouth operated programmable joystick/mouse/keyboard. A sequential combination of up to eight input signals (specific joystick movements and/or a sequence of hard or soft sip & puffs on four different tubes) can trigger the sending of up to six preprogrammed keyboard keys, or it can just recognize characters traced out on the joystick and send them one at a time.