Charles Tandy, the mastermind behind Radio Shack
dfarq.homeip.net
dfarq.homeip.net
As an engineer my boss will approve $80 for a single resister after overnight shipping if that is what I need. The factory is buying the resisters a reel at a time (or similar large quantities)
OTOH, some items were surprisingly cheap. A couple years after college, I had a small business running out of a spare bedroom making temperature monitors and there was a shielded audio cable with connector that I used for the sensor. Radio Shack's price was about $1.50 each but all the "real" parts houses were at least 5x that.
I used to get assortments from Radio Shack with dozens of mundane resistors for a few dollars. That was also expensive per-part, but the convenience of have-it-now, cash-and-carry has a price.
Today, I can order a kit with 1,000 1/8W resistors, of 50 different values, for $7.99 from Amazon. I can build any specific resistor value I want with that kit. It will show up tomorrow, but if I'd looked earlier in the day then I'd have found that I could have it yet today for an extra $3.
Or: I can get an assembled book of 2900 1/8W through-hole resistors from AliExpress. 145 values, in pockets with plainly-readable labels, one value per pocket, all wrapped up in durable-enough 6-ring binder. That's $25 and ships free; I'd expect it to arrive in a week or two.
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So what I've done for noodling around at home is buy inexpensive assortments. In this way, I've already got resistors in stock at home. And capacitors, diodes, transistors, and even jellybean ICs -- along with a better selection of small metric stainless hardware than Ace Hardware offers. I don't miss Radio Shack for these parts, and I'm done paying 53 cents for each M3 x 10mm screw at the hardware store.
It did not cost very much to procure this stuff (and I bought it slowly over time, as-needed, which spread out the expense and avoided effort to forecast need), and it doesn't take up much room to keep it around.
It's pretty good to be able to build a thing on a whim.
Absolutely, in their heyday.
By the end, I met an employee who very derisively told me I didn't need to connect all three terminals on a transistor for it to work. According to him, the collector was often skipped in circuits.
So, by that single indicator, they were already the Walking Dead. But I could ignore him and still buy what I needed, then.
We're around the same age and likely have similar memories. I poured over Radio Shack catalogs and weekly ads when I was a kid. When my family went to the local mall I'd make a beeline for the Radio Shack and play w/ the various computers there until my parents pried me away.
When I started doing PC tech work (in rural Western Ohio in the late 90s) it was always an option, no matter how far out in "the sticks" you were working, to drive to a Radio Shack for emergency parts. They might not have exactly what you needed, and you'd probably pay a hefty price, but you could get the job done.
That ubiquity definitely left an impression on IT technicians of my generation. I was recently doing some work w/ a legacy system that called for some serial gender-bender/null modem cables. Not having any handy I had to improvise with some DE-9 to RJ-45 hoods and creative crimping to get what I needed. A cow-orker commented "We used to be able to just go to Radio Shack when we needed stuff like that in a hurry."
Sounds like my childhood. Remember the Tandy TRS-80 CoCo? I do. :)
A common BASIC program I'd write on new-to-me computers was a FOR/NEXT loop to print all the characters in the character set. I remember discovering the color semigraphics characters in the CoCo character set and being weirded-out. I'd never seen anything like that on any of the other machines I'd ever used.
I snared a CoCo2 a few years ago so I could re-live a few of those memories (and explore the machine with actual documentation).
There are several other good sources out there too but it's a good start for anyone looking to relive the fun old days.
The complete version is also available there for purchase.
Few things impress me more than someone using shell sizes correctly :-)
I considered saying "8P8C" for the jack, as well. >smile<
Are you serious? That's fkn brilliant!
It didn't push to the computers; we loaded the program from floppy to the CoCo 3 and then for each CoCo 2 manually executed a cassette load from the CoCo 3 via the rotary link, but it worked and was much cheaper than equipping each client with its own storage.
Radioshack catalog archive in case anybody missed it:
I also did one for the venerable 555 Timer (but it needs another iteration before I should market it).
https://archive.org/details/color-computer-magazine-1984-04
The internals however are quite fascinating on their own and an amazing accomplishment of mechanical engineering for a toy.
But, yeah, I applied to work at a Radio Shack as a teen. The manager during the interview put a stapler on the desk between us and told me, "Sell the stapler to me."
He was apparently looking not merely for someone knowledgeable about electronics but rather someone who would push products—make sales.
After (I did not get the job), I did begin to notice the pushiness of the sales people, and found it more and more uncomfortable to be in the store.
For good memories, I like to scrape this site: https://radioshackcatalogs.com/index.htm
But Radio Shack was also a pioneer in intrusive information gathering. They would always ask for your name and address at check-out, often practically insisting they couldn't complete the sale without it. I usually gave them "1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington DC" as my address. I hope Clinton and GWB liked those catalogs!
They had the same virtual console behavior as we see in Linux.
I had a friend who worked in one of the stores, and I scared the daylights out of him by hitting Ctrl-Alt-F4 on his cash register to get a login. After switching back to F1, he learned the scary trick himself. I have no idea why all of the gettys were enabled in /etc/inittab.
Edit: I had no idea about Pier 1 (rest in peace), the 1959 proxy battle for the family takeover, Tandy's sale of Pier 1 in 1966, Tandy's purchase of a controlling interest in the failing Radio Shack for $300k, Tandy's abrasive management style, or his early demise at 60 from a heart attack.
Peir 1 folded just as we entered the COVID pandemic.
Tandy had a Xenix license from Microsoft and shipped a version on their TRS-80 Model 16 and Tandy 6000 machines (both of which were Motorola 68000-based). It would be interesting to know how much of their own stuff they used internally. I have a recollection of a (potentially apocryphal) story the TRS-80 Model 1 had a "fallback" use as an in-store management computer if they failed to sell.
https://www.eetimes.com/sco-provides-free-unix-system-licens...
From memory, the two serial ports could run classic getty processes.
Here's hoping for the power of Hacker News.
Unfortunately, anyone who managed or worked on a curses app that relayed store sales data to a corporate database would need an exceptional memory in their retirement.
i just learned there are about 100 Tandy Leather stores out there if you want to pay tribute
I've not been very sympathetic to the demise of bricks & mortar retail since then.
I worked there in the 80s. Early 80s was paper. Late 80s was terminal. Typing an R in the first name field bypassed this obligation IIRC.
Reason RS was so insistent is the company originally started via mail order and wanted this revenue stream to not dwindle....although it obviously did by the 80s.
PS: There's a business who still has their Tandy Leather sign out front in my city.
So much value is destroyed by this form of taxation. It's inherent in having to liquidate much wealth in a short period of time. There should be a way to match the time scales better, as opposed to forcing a company to go public. Like putting non-voting shares into escrow and allowing them to be sold over years or decades.
This would come with the loss of taxes as businesses go under, but at least some offsetting increase from successful businesses that are allowed to continue operating.
Plus the federal estate tax only starts at $15M for an individual and $30M for a married couple, so it has no effect on what most would consider a "small" business.
Most people on this forum would be served well (or at least their heirs) by spending a few thousand on an estate lawyer to prevent their heirs from having to waste time in probate court.
My concern with estate taxes is, like I said, the potential destruction of functioning businesses-- just what was discussed in the article.
I know the tax code has provisions to permit an extension of up to fourteen years for payment. There's a non-tax-deductible interest expense, though. A business with low margins might not be able to absorb that expense even over a 14 year time window.
In the end I'm probably thinking too theoretically. Perhaps there are no real businesses large enough to exceed the estate tax exemption that haven't otherwise planned for succession.
I may just be getting "the feels" about theoretical jobs being destroyed in service of taxation.
re: small business
In my mind, at least, a business w/ a $30 million capitalization is a small business. Where I am (rural Ohio) a decently-sized family farming operation could hit that $30M cap (with land prices being what they are now). That's between 1,500 and 2,000 acres of farmland at market price. That doesn't take into account potentially inflated valuations as a result of datacenter speculators. In my county we've seen a Meta datacenter project pay 10x market value for farmland (resulting in skewed property tax valuations across the entire county).
There is a simple word for what you are.
I remember Enercell for batteries, Supertape for cassette tapes, Genexa TVs and VCRs, Archer TV/radio aerials and distribution systems, Micronta meters, and, of course, the Science Fair 200-in-1 electronic project kits.
The branch opposite my school had several "characters" amongst the staff who would amuse themselves by pelting you with dud resistors if you refused their entreaties to sign up to the Battery Club. A great place for nerdy teenagers to visit, but I can't imagine them actually ever having sold very much...
They sold a "1000-in-one" electronics kit that came with a book that would teach you all that you needed to know to get started with a lifelong addiction to electronics parts. My grandpa gave me one as a birthday gift one year, and thus began my early addiction to Radio Shack. ;)
At my first job, we used Model I's for testing hardware. Since we were live-plugging I/O boards into the bus to test quickly, we'd occasionally kill one (they were surprisingly robust, though). No matter: there was a shelf full of them because the owner bought a pallet at a garage sale.
If I had known there was a floppy for it, I'd have asked for one. Our BASIC test code had to be typed back in if there was a power failure, or we had to get a "new" one off the shelf.
CoCo3 came with 128k out the box though.
Fascinating guy!
HN rules.
We had a TRS-80 Color Computer 2. I wish I had some story about how I was a brilliant kid who learned every program in the book but all we ever did with the kaleidescope program. And we didn't have a tape drive or anything so we just had to turn the computer off when we wanted to watch tv (for the kids - some computers back then used a tv as a monitor - you would attach an adapter to the back of the tv and turn it to (channel 3?) and you could use it. We also had the original grey Armatron.
I don't have any particular memory of Radio Shack. I wasn't an electronics nerd, I was book nerd.