Zurdo wrote:
Since the "replace your pickups with mine because mine are better" craze started in the late 1980's....
Actually, it started in the late '60's with replacement ceramic bar magnets you could buy to swap out the alnico bar magnets in famous double coil pickups to get more output and brighter tone. Then in the early '70's Larry DiMarzio started making replacement pickups that were drop-in retrofits for those same pickups. Then not too long after that Seymour Duncan came home from working in London and started his pickup replacement business.
I'm not going into active pickups and other branches and approaches.
All this came about because, except for Rickenbacker, the other companies were cheapening up their stock pickups to where "they did not sound like they used to" and there were two camps: those that wanted the "older" tones back, and those who wanted to go in new directions.
What happened in the '80's and '90's is that everybody else jumped on the replacement bandwagon (pun intended) with either the "me too" or "niche" business models.
And as usual, Rickenbacker kept on doing what it does best and still does best.