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<
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).
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.
---
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.
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.
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
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.