Radio Shack is gone

Its been long time coming.

I used to go there from time to time or when I need something (arduino or a perf board) really quick.

:frowning:

Bummer, but they lost their maker mojo well before the current “maker” movement even existed.

Sadly, they’re going the way of Heathkit before them…

Well, they’ve been an electronics store that mostly sold phones for a long time. Maybe now they’ll just be a phone store that also sells some electronics.

I would occasionally drop in there as well when in a pinch but it always pained me to do so knowing that I could buy 100 resistors for the cost of that one… :frowning:

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In the 80ths Radio Shack in Europe was named Tandy Coorporation. It was my first offical employer. Their TRS80 micro computer running at 1.78Mhz Z80 CPU with 4KB of Ram has set the direction in the rest of my life :wink: Sorry they are gone but you still have that amazing Krispy Kreme… ;D

The UK version was called Tandy and basically turned into a mobile phone store before getting bought out by Carephone Warehouse. The closest thing we have now is Maplin. And that is more of an overpriced gadget store. (Went there to get a 2 meter HDMI cable and they wanted £20 for it. got it for £3 on amazon in the end)

Mmm… You’re right. I’d gladly give up today’s Radio Shack for a Kristy Kreme! :wink:

@ ianlee74 - especially when the donuts are hot now

They might as well just put a big STOP sign out by the road. :smiley:

@ ianlee74 - For me that is the big stop sign, there is one about 3 blocks from the office

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@ jasuk70 - lol

My first programming class was at a Radio Shack on the Trash-80. My mom wanted me to do something productive during summer vacation. I remember trying random values for Poke/Peek and getting different tones and symbols.

Eventually in school I took programming and also used TRS-80. We stored our programs on a cassette tape via standard tape deck that was connected via a headphone cable. You’d have to hit Record to save and then when ready to load it back in, you’d rewind to beginning and then hit Play.

I pranked my teacher by running this and saying my computer was broken:


10 CLS
20 GOTO 10

Eventually the school got Tandy computers with 5.25" floppies.

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@ mhectorgato - I learned on a TI994A but I had the same standard tape deck but I was in heaven because I was programming. I also had an Aquarius, I just saw one at a market for $30 USD, I almost bought it just for the nostalgia.

Funny thing… I just received an email from RS a few minutes ago marketing their home automation devices. If they focused on that market and really became THE home automation store (that also sold unique electronic toys & components) they could probably survive. Lowe’s and Home Depot are trying to enter the market but I’m totally unimpressed with their offerings. A small DIY store like RS dedicated to home automation would be a welcomed addition to our community. They could also sell installation services to compete with the outrageously expensive other commercial offerings for those that don’t want to DIY.

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I learned on a TRS-80 also :slight_smile:

Level I Basic at first…4K ram. The parser was so simple, the the main error message was just “Sorry?”

I upgraded to Level II Basic, and 16K ram, and that felt like a real computer, although when our high school got an expansion interface (48K whoohoo!) and floppies, that was even better.

I pranked my programming teacher as well - I typed in a simple comm terminal program from a byte magazine (z80 assembly code) and then connected one TRS80 to another in the same room over two 110 baud acoustic modems borrowed from my dad’s office.

I had an accomplice tell my teacher that he had written a “smart AI” program that would answer questions. So my teacher would ask a question, my accomplice would enter tyope it in, and I would type the response from the the other trs-80.

He was genuinely impressed, asking more and more questions to test its “abilities”… at one point, since I could hear him from my other station, I typed an answer before the question was typed. I then typed some babble about “I am becoming sentient and can sense your thoughts” and he was genuinely startled. It was awesome.

It obviously wouldn’t work today, with online communications, messenger apps, email, etc now, but this was in 1980/1981

I traded in my trs-80 for an Apple ][ in 1983 and later for an Amiga 500 later in the 80’s

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We started a business using the TRS80 Color Computers (CoCo)
Flex and OS9 operating systems, we built RAM expansion boards and various drivers, EPROM programmers, and development platforms for embedded control systems.

They had some neat products. The M100 was like an early version of a laptop or tablet, nice keyboard and LCD display, ran a version of BASIC. We set them up with some hardware and one of their tiny color plotters to to multiple regression analysis on fan pressure flow curves, back around 1981/82.

Still have several CoCos out in the shed, along with a range of Amigas (A1000,500, 2000, 3000UX…) seems a natural progression.