Pennyrick
New member
In 1963, the year after I got married, a guy named Tandy bought out Radio Shack (a firm out of Boston founded by two brothers who were Ham radio enthusiasts) and moved their headquarters to Fort Worth where he ran a chain of leather craft stores.
He expanded Radio Shack (named after the place on boats where the wireless equipment was housed) modeling it after his leather business. He stocked thousands of items in the stores that appealed to radio hobbyists… batteries, cords, switches, dials, capacitors, etc. and by 1971 there were 1,000 stores.
I bought my first radio kit at Radio Shack. My first 23 channel CB unit came from there. A set of Radio Shack Realistic shelf speakers were a nice add to my stereo system and in 1979 I bought a TRS-80. A 12 inch monitor with just one shade of gray, 16K of memory and a cassette player where you could save data while waiting for someone to invent a hard drive. What a wonderful thing it was. (The operating system was from Microsoft).
Then along came cell phones and Radio Shack jumped in with both feet. The company changed from one where employees could assist people in hooking up their VCR to their TV to one where all they did was push cell phones and cell plans.
Ask an employee for a Y cable to turn an RF into a mini and you would get a blank stare.
But the monster cell phone company, soon began to kill off their merchandise lines… the GPS, the camcorder, the voice recorder, answering machines, etc. were all swallowed up in one device called an IPhone. The IPhone had negated any need for fourteen of the fifteen lead items in the Radio Shack 1996 catalog.
Ahhh, the catalog. It was a pain in the rear to record your name and address with each sale but it got you on the list to be mailed that great catalog… it was fun to read.
Goodbye Radio Shack… R.I.P.
He expanded Radio Shack (named after the place on boats where the wireless equipment was housed) modeling it after his leather business. He stocked thousands of items in the stores that appealed to radio hobbyists… batteries, cords, switches, dials, capacitors, etc. and by 1971 there were 1,000 stores.
I bought my first radio kit at Radio Shack. My first 23 channel CB unit came from there. A set of Radio Shack Realistic shelf speakers were a nice add to my stereo system and in 1979 I bought a TRS-80. A 12 inch monitor with just one shade of gray, 16K of memory and a cassette player where you could save data while waiting for someone to invent a hard drive. What a wonderful thing it was. (The operating system was from Microsoft).
Then along came cell phones and Radio Shack jumped in with both feet. The company changed from one where employees could assist people in hooking up their VCR to their TV to one where all they did was push cell phones and cell plans.
Ask an employee for a Y cable to turn an RF into a mini and you would get a blank stare.
But the monster cell phone company, soon began to kill off their merchandise lines… the GPS, the camcorder, the voice recorder, answering machines, etc. were all swallowed up in one device called an IPhone. The IPhone had negated any need for fourteen of the fifteen lead items in the Radio Shack 1996 catalog.
Ahhh, the catalog. It was a pain in the rear to record your name and address with each sale but it got you on the list to be mailed that great catalog… it was fun to read.
Goodbye Radio Shack… R.I.P.
