Systems like the Tandy Model 102 (cue "Bill Gate's last coding project!") were US localized Kyocera computers, for instance.
Unrelated, even Sadly even You-Do-It closed their physical location.
I wish the site allowed searching by catalog number.
(Of course, there was a time when that was kind of a thing: Back in the 700MHz spectrum auction days, 20-ish years ago, Qualcomm bought some big chunks with the intent of using it for one-to-many broadcasts of television channels, to be viewed on select feature phones of the day. It rolled out in at least some markets, and I even knew a person who had such a phone and the service to use with it.)
I could diagnose and prescribe for any TV or media combination. 300 ohm wire, 75 ohm cable, or mix and match for fun. Need RCA cord? No problem, let me show you these gold-plated patch cords (back before digital audio, when that made a difference). You're going to need two splitters and this switch here...
And then there was the day where I spent two hours selling that Tandy 1000. It was going to be my biggest commission ever! Just as I was about to ring it up, my boss rolls over and says, "Don't worry. I've got this."
Fairly soon after that I chose to not be an employee of Radio Shack.
Edit: the RS I worked at was across the street from a mall that had an RS in it. I very rarely made commission.
The system's inability to play doom was the downfall of my childhood, lol, but I got to play Zork and Enchanter and a bunch of other infocom games as well as having my first forays into cyberspace thanks to a $1 600 baud flea market modem.
Uber elite hacker mode engaged calling my local bbs at 2 in the morning after everyone was asleep style playing Usurper and Legend of the Red Dragon while reading bootleg and highly questionable copies of the anarchists cookbook were some of the highlights of my pre-highschool life.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/8f6p9i/battery_c...
Spelled “lite”. I thought so but wasn’t confident about it.
If Argos is your thing: https://retromash.com/argos/
Sometimes we would have identical items from both companies, with the Realistic model on sale or special with free batteries or an extended warranty.
I'm interested in that TRS-XENIX operating system from 1983:
> Derived from Western Electric's UNIX™ Operating System.
The 1983 lineup (RSC-8) is impressive - everything from handhelds to home/game systems to CP/M to multiuser/UNIX systems. It's a shame that they apparently discouraged third-party software and games.
[Writing this post on a Unix-based system from Apple, Radio Shack's less-successful competitor.]
I actually developed business apps (and did sysadmin) on Altos Xenix machines back in the early nineties - they were quite nice.
Don't even want to know. That's some "the menu doesn't have any prices listed" bullshit.
Sure, the Internet made access to any part you needed at prices that still make RS look like highway robbery (even after 30 years of inflation!), but there's something to be said for a curated list of the most common items a tech-geek would need, in a store where you could have the item in your hand in a hour.
A drawback was that the Radio Shack catalog was curated, and therefore, outdated. That's where Digi-Key and others (RS Electronics, McMaster-Carr) were eye-opening.
Today the Digi-Key catalog would be a foot thick.
At least. The last one I remember them sending me about 10 years ago was already almost 3" thick.
I can completely relate to this. Even decades later, I can remember seeing a particular part in the catalog, and even roughly what section it was in. But I don't know how to search for it using the online tools.
Radio Shack was like a constant companion to us, among other outlets. When I was in high school, Grandma would take me and my sister on the bus to the shopping mall. When I wasn't flirting with the tall blonde clerks in a record shop, I was hanging out in Radio Shack having long tech convos with "Jon" the junior clerk.
I purchased all kinds of gadgets during that time, including cool microphones for "clandestine" recording; a matching microcassette recorder and media; a 2" LCD television set, handheld and battery-powered; a complete 100-project eletronics kit; an Armatron robot arm; radio-controlled sports cars; you name it!
We went there like every week, and the sky was the limit for gadgets that followed me home, and Jon was quite entertaining, as he knew he'd always make that sale if he was friendly and patient with this tech-nerd teenaged boy. Always the highlight of my week.
Fast-forward to 1998, and I'm in Oregon, with no car, and the only points of interest in my neighborhood are a Subway sandwich shop, and a Radio Shack, so I obtained a store credit card and picked up one of those gigantic CD changers, and a remote-controlled boat, because I lived in a lakeside apartment. Good times!
When I need something unusual, and I need it right now, they're the first place I look. I try to throw more common business their way, too, because I want them to be open and available forever.
My dad went to Sim Lim Square (in Singapore) back in the 90s and he wanted to take me back when we visited a few years ago. There was a bunch of gaming stuff and they got the 4090 early than the US so I was happy, but he was miffed and disappointed at the lack of components and cheap electronics.
- Mouser
- SparkFun
- Adafruit
- Antique Electronic Supply
- Sphere Research Corporation
-Ebay, occasionally, if the seller is trusted and known by your corner of the electronics community.
There are several mailing lists where you can get equipment and parts as well over on groups.io.
- test-equipment-buy-sell-exchange
- tekscopes
- hp-agilent-keysight-equipment
and other sources that I'm not remembering off the top of my head. Check out the EEVBlog forums, they probably have a list somewhere, or can tell you where they shop. Same with the various mailing lists. If they don't have it, they might be able to point you towards who does.
There is also a mobile mode, but not like a bulk PDF.
I'm guessing they're saving bandwidth by loading each page individually. If they gave me PDFs, I would spider all 73 years like a packrat, and look at < 10% of them.
If you look for a dinky little search engine called presearch, which isn't anything special, but is still superior to google because it hasn't gone through censorship/marketing armageddon, what you SHOULD NOT DO is presearch- radio shack catalogs "torrent" - and DO NOT click on links to 1337x.to or else you might accidentally download the catalog torrent.
I glad we have websites like SparkFun and friends, but there was something about browsing the catalogs or visiting the stores that was creatively inspiring. (RIP Fry's)
I was at MicroCenter in Cambridge yesterday, so that experience isn't totally lost, but it's harder to find.
I'm still salty about the bafflingly stupid decision to become little more than a cellphone store.
What happened to Radio Shack is pretty sad. I get that the business simply wasn't going to sustain at that scale as consumer tech evolved, but RS caused their own decline way sooner than it should have happened. Becoming a high pressure cellphone retailer was a stupid idea, and I remember their selection not even being that good to begin with. And, like Kramer from Seinfeld said, Radio Shack really wanted your phone number for purchasing something as simple as batteries. Today, phone numbers are asked for all the time when purchasing something like groceries, but I remember Radio Shack being overly aggressive in getting your phone number. Meanwhile, their electronics component inventory kept dwindling.
At least with Fry's Electronics, they still had a lot of components on the shelf right until the very end, as ridiculously overpriced as they were, whereas Radio Shack seemed to dismiss its core audience.
Silicon Valley's convenience store when JDR Microdevices, Graybar, and such weren't open... such a tiny addressable market that vanished to zero and failed to keep up with the advent of the internet. Other regional shops in other regions like B & H Photo at least figured out how to sell to a national audience and keep parity with their brick & mortar to complement each other (MicroCenter and Central Computer Systems also managed to survive). Fry's carried overpriced oddball inventory and failed to focus as Amazon, eBay, and Best Buy grew while even CompUSA (the long-time tech hypermart) died.
Microcenter. Granted much larger and fewer store model, not a slot next to Orange Julius.
But RadioShack was famously cluelessly managed for years.
https://theonion.com/even-ceo-cant-figure-out-how-radioshack...
This made me chuckle.
Tough too to get by on small parts for minor repairs when things break rarely and then aren't worth fixing. Time was grocery stores had little tube tester kiosks, you know. That said, Batteries Plus seems to have a business.
Incredible Universe was very similar to Frys and catered mostly to consumer electronics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incredible_Universe
I remember some buzz around carrying Arduino not long before they went out of business. They drifted away from the DIY scene into cellphone kiosk territory. Maybe if they shuttered a bunch of stores and leaned into the new era of DIY (Arduino, 3D printing, drone parts) they might have survived.
That was a little after my time, but back in the 90s my second job after I got tired of being a dishwasher was at Radio Shack.
During the brief time I worked there if I sold a single Tandy Sensation! (had to say it with the exclamation mark) the profit on that sale would exceed, by a lot, every single component we sold the entire month, and as an awkward teen I sold a lot of Tandy Sensation!s per month.
At my store, when I worked there, electronics parts took up about a quarter of the square footage of the store but was practically none of our revenue.
The only people buying electronics parts were church AV guys trying to fix a worn out 1/4" jack or blown capacitor in an amplifier.
Can't pay rent on those guys.
As an outsider I watched the parts shelves go from most of the back of the store to a single set of drawers to nothing and I can't say I blame Radio Shack. A lot of time was spent inventorying a mindboggling array of components, none of which sold in volumes great enough to justify the expense or the space.
I would walk to to my local radio shack at least once a week for different parts for a few years as my friend and I were constantly modding our consoles, breaking our computers, and making little gadgets.
I’d love a place I could walk into now and get a breadboard kit or a potentiometer, and it’s just not there.
So what choice did they have to sell the item that replaced most of the store?
That cover is so late-90/early-2000s.
A free, hackable device which cost Radio Shack $6.50/unit (just to manufacture)? I'll take three...
For anybody looking through OP's Catalog Archive, this would have been late-2000/early-2001.
[0] wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
There were a lot of heated words on Slashdot about this back then. Now, people would just accept that.
Edit: Yep. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
> Wired magazine mailed over 500,000 of the free devices as gifts to their subscribers.
At the Radio Shack that I frequented, they weren't quite free: I had to take a paper catalog along with the barcode reader -- even though I already had a copy of that same catalog on my coffee table at home that they'd sent in the mail.
I wound up with a couple of them that I never did much with. (I had some grand ideas of using them for automated shopping lists for pantry items that worked fine in my head...until I realized that the concept required very good compliance from the entire household or it became pretty useless. I didn't want to start that war so the concept went nowhere.)
Is there anything currently similar to McMaster-Carr[0] for electronics? They seem to do the best in terms of a technical parts catalog.
Those were great fun for the curious.
I also remember being quite excited when I got one of their "Flavoradios", in yellow, for Christmas one year.
Outside of a cell phone, which, yea, I bought one there, my last major purchase was a handheld CB radio. I still have it, I wish I could open it, the batteries leaked and compartment is sealed (and you need to get inside to unscrew the housing). But it was nice because I got it for a 4WD trip, and I knew that if anyone was going to have a CB radio, it was Radio Shack. And they did, and it worked great for that trip. That was probably 2000, 2001 or so.
I spent a lot of time at the Radio Shack as a kid, my folks bought a lot of stuff there, including computers.
Editor/Assembler Program
Although 16K of RAM is required, this package will run with Level-1 BASIC. It is a 2-cassette program which creates both source and object files. Microsoft, an industry leader in systems software, has developed this program - so you can expect the ultimate in editing features. Standard Zilog mnemonics are used; macros and conditional assembly are not supported.
$29.95
Like some other commenters, things like this were formative in helping me get interested and get really good at electronic-y things. Visits to the store, browsing parts, seeing how things were made and put together were just jet fuel for project ideas.