Many fond memories of Radio Shack. I bought some electronics kits, a mini DJ setup, and many, many components there as a kid. At one time, they had quite a catalog of Radio Shack branded items that were "good but not great"... but more importantly available a few miles away within practically any city. Almost every mall in St. Louis had one (usually near a hobby train store or an arcade).
They were always expensive, but you could go there on a Saturday afternoon and get something that will work - it might not be the right part, but it could be made to work. And expensive is relative - a $0.05 resister for $0.75 is very overpriced, and yet cheap. If you want to be in a hobby having that access close makes it a lot easier.
What's the cost of shipping on a single resistor from mouser or digi-key? Can you buy <15 from Amazon? Another way to think of it is that the ability to have no minimum quantity, not having to wait for shipping and maybe, if you're lucky, someone who can help you with info if you need it is baked into the price. With that in mind, maybe it isn't as overpriced as it seems.
I don't buy a single anything from those others. I'm going to buy enough to meet their $40 minimum order. Shipping isn't free, and takes 4-6 weeks (remember this is 1960-1990). All this means that I'm planning all my projects months ahead to make a large order that will keep me busy several months (starting 2 months from now)
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)
Amazon didn't exist at that time (or was probably still only selling books). Digi-Key still had a $25 minimum order. RS was pretty much the only game in town if you were a high schooler with a small allowance.
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.
The cheapest price Digikey shows me for shipping a single 1/8W 1k through-hole resistor is $4.99. That's a very expensive, very mundane resistor. It will not be delivered swiftly: I've had orders made on the same day show up faster from AliExpress sellers in China than the cheap shipping from Digikey and Mouser.
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.
> someone who can help you with info if you need it is baked into the price.
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.
The last few years corporate was telling everyone get out of hobbies, the money is in selling cell phones. Until everyone had a cell phone and the good deal to upgrade without changing carriers were only had in the company store. All the third party stores including radio shack disappeared overnight since none had a fall back.
> ...but more importantly available a few miles away within practically any city.
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 their 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."
Absolutely! There would inevitably be a CoCo on display and that's the machine I'd play with.
A common 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 relive a few of those memories (and explore the machine with actual documentation).
Ah, the nostalgia. Those early days of home computers were sure some amazing times. Possibilities were infinite. Who'da thunk that we'd carry freakin' supercomputers (compared to those early machines) around in our pockets someday? Not me. LOL!
My favorite part of that era was subscribing to Rainbow magazine. Every month when it arrived, reading it cover to cover a few times. I didn't have access to any dialup in those days, so this was my only window to the whole ecosystem. I remember a box of 5.25 inch floppies were horrendously expensive at Radio Shack, maybe it was just our store though, I grew up in a small town in Canada.
We spent hours at the local one. Picked up lots of parts and gear when I suppose they would have rather us bought their relabeled Realistic stuff. In junior high helped the 5th grade teacher with his network of CoCo 2s that used a CoCo 3 as a "file server" via a rotary dial to download courseware through the cassette interface. I wrote a fraction math trainer in BASIC for him to use with the students. He was still using it when I was in high school.
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.
You basically have to ignore the internals and mount motors to the outside. Still, it's doable, as these instructions from 1984 demonstrate. Probably can make something far better today.
I was coming here to post my un fond memories of Radio Shack. But to be sure I loved their 150-in-1 Electronic Kits (etc.)—they were perhaps my favorite present as a kid—shaped white I am today…
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.
I have a really good DJ mixer that was Radio Shack branded. Three channels with two crossfaders and at least 5 input channels with some switchable into the main 3 with the full mix controls. I only use it once a year to have a bring your records party and have a couple of turntables a dvd-CD player, a vintage tape deck and a general headphone input for devices.
That was for radio & hifi kit, but they had a bunch of others.
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...
I wish the stores were still around. As a kid, I loved going through the bins of electronic components, trying to figure out how they'd all work together in a circuit. As an adult who just got his Ham Radio Technician license, I'd love to be able to drop by and grab a few parts instead of ordering online. Ham Radio Outlet is great, but they are few and far between.
> As a kid, I loved going through the bins of electronic components, trying to figure out how they'd all work together in a circuit.
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. ;)
I had a couple of those, usually for Christmas, including one with hex keys and 4-bit CPU that you could program. Much better than the "snap circuits" that the kids have these days.
I knew one of on the Tandys. He was a super interesting fellow and you never would have known he came from a wealthy background. He sold 5 gallon water jugs out of a white van in St. Thomas.
And never mentioned Jonathan T. Frye, who wrote a column iun the Radio Shack flyers about what was going on in the business. Like opening their own recording tape company. Or opening 1,000 stores in the USA. Or the milestone when they had 2,000 stores in the usa.
I miss having a local place where I can buy a discrete transistor or capacitor.
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!
I think their cash registers ran SCO Xenix. I ran the free version on my desktop at work for a few months in the late 90s (I think that I still have the installation media).
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.
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.
Free OpenServer appeared in 1996. The cash registers were running on the x86 platform, for sure (68000 was a dead architecture for general purpose computing by then - Apple had been on POWER for several years).
i learned how to write BASIC on a Tandy Color Computer 3 but that is not what I am most proud about. I was officially (statistically) the worst salesperson at Radio Shack in northern Ohio one summer in college. I looked like a dynamo of productivity, but in actuality I was mostly spending time talking to a Ham radio operator about diodes or a musician customer about King Crimson and Can. Take your name and address. Pffft, I would often make something up so nobody noticed. I sold a computer to a woman for her daughter going to college and felt dirty but there was no other way she was getting a computer. I hope she went on to become an astronaut, or principled House member
i just learned there are about 100 Tandy Leather stores out there if you want to pay tribute
yeah because just like every store clerk wants to know where you live and what color your morning urine had, every neighbor wants to scam you out of your insurance.
The store I was at, Currys/PC World has a track record. No, I won't be buying my sausages and bread from Amazon, but also no, I won't trust a high volume high street retailer more than Amazon either and I may as well go to them for the convenience and lower prices.
Huh, they asked for phone number here in SoCal. I may have given it the first time but afterward always said no or no thanks. Don’t remember them insisting but if they did I’d probably have given Jenny’s number.
> insisting they couldn't complete the sale without it
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.
I still have my Color Computer I in a box somewhere in the garage, with the original large cassette tape player I used to read and write cassette tapes with. I've probably forgotten exactly what volume I had to keep it at to get it to read the tapes. As a dumb kid, I managed to get the keyboard swapped out (hated the chiclet one it came with), and I think I found someone who swapped out the 16K it came with for (iirc) 128K. I should really see if it boots. Or even turns on.
I don't think the CoCo I could be expanded beyond 32k since that's as many address lines as they brought out to the bus. When I worked for Alpha Products/Colorware, we sold a MacPaint clone for the CoCo2 that required 64k.
> Since Tandy was a private company, his death would have forced a liquidation of the company in order to pay the inheritance taxes.
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 a successful businesses that are allowed to continue operating.
There are so many mature and overly effective modern means to preserve wealth. Modern trusts, LLCs, corporations ad nauseum. It is embarrassing to make such a claim "(s)o much value is destroyed by this form of taxation" in 2026; So much concentrated and localized value was diverted back then under such specialized and naive conditions, which is far from common now.
Exactly. It's hard to read a sob story about some private company getting liquidated to pay taxes when the far more common abuse of inheritance tax laws is the asset step up basis on death. We should narrow down considerably the amount of assets eligible for that treatment. As it is we just perpetuate ever increasing family dynasties having no relationship to merit.
Jessica Tandy, a supporting actress in the 1987 film "Batteries not Included", was also an early and avid member of Radio Shack's Battery of the month club up until her passing in 1994.
My dad used to work as an electrician at the Tandy Center in Forth Worth, ages ago. I barely remember the monorail/subway thing that went into the building.
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.
78 comments
[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 47.5 ms ] threadAs 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.
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 their 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 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 relive 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:
https://radioshackcatalogs.com/index.htm
I also did one for the venerable 555 Timer (but it needs another iteration before I should market it).
https://www.starborneworks.com/?p=22
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
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. ;)
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.
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...
i just learned there are about 100 Tandy Leather stores out there if you want to pay tribute
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.
CoCo3 came with 128k out the box though.
Fascinating guy!
HN rules.
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 a successful businesses that are allowed to continue operating.
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.