With Radio Shack having declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with hundreds of stores closing and others possibly becoming Sprint locations, let’s take a moment to look back at the important contributions the company made in the early days of personal computing.
Charles Tandy started the Tandy Leather Company which opened hundreds of little shops in the 1950s selling kits for consumers to make their own tooled leather belts, for example. I made one in 1959, burning my name into the belt with a soldering iron. As leather craft faded as a hobby and electronics boomed many of those Tandy Leather stores became Radio Shacks (but not all — a few leather stores survive even today). Radio Shack stores always had the advantage of proximity balanced by higher prices. If you needed a part or two you drove down to Radio Shack but if you had a bunch of electronic parts to buy there was generally some cheaper store across town.
Even today you can buy a $35 Raspberry Pi computer from the Raspberry Pi Foundation or a $121 Raspberry Pi kit from Radio Shack. No wonder the Shack is in trouble.
Just as Jack Tramiel’s Commodore rode the 1970’s handheld calculator boom, Radio Shack rode that decade’s even bigger CB Radio boom. But as each boom faded the two companies had to find the Next Big Thing, so they both turned to personal computers.
Radio Shack found its salvation in Steve Leininger, an employee at Paul Terrell’s Byte Shop in Mountain View where the original Apple 1s were sold. Leininger designed the TRS-80 that was to become, from 1978-82, the fastest selling computer in the world — bigger at the time than even the Apple II. The barebones TRS-80 cost $199.95 in a pretty much unusable form and about $1800 completely tricked out. The TRS-80 was fabulously successful.
Not so successful but equally important to computer history was Radio Shack’s answer to the IBM PC, the Model 2000, which appeared in the fall of 1983. The Model 2000 was intended to beat the IBM PC with twice the speed, more storage, and higher-resolution graphics. The trick was its more powerful processor, the Intel 80186, which could run rings around IBM’s old 8088.
Because Tandy had its own distribution through 5,000 Radio Shack stores and through a chain of Tandy Computer Centers, the company thought for a long time that it was somehow immune to the influence of the IBM PC standard. The TRS-80, after all, was a proprietary design and a huge success. Tandy thought of their trusty Radio Shack customers as Albanians who would loyally shop at the Albanian Computer Store, no matter what was happening in the rest of the world. Alas, it was not to be so.
Bill Gates was a strong believer in the Model 2000 because it was the only mass market personal computer powerful enough to run new software from Microsoft called Windows without being embarrassingly slow. For Windows to succeed. Bill Gates needed a computer like the Model 2000 available everywhere. So young Bill, who handled the Tandy account himself, predicted that the computer would be a grand success—something the boys and girls at Tandy HQ in Fort Worth wanted badly to hear. And Gates made a public endorsement of the Model 2000, hoping to sway customers and promote Windows as well.
Still, the Model 2000 failed miserably. Nobody gave a damn about Windows 1, which didn’t appear until 1985, and even then didn’t work well. The computer wasn’t hardware compatible with IBM. It wasn’t very software compatible with IBM either, and the most popular IBM PC programs—the ones that talked directly to the PC’s memory and so worked faster than those that allowed the operating system to do the talking for them— wouldn’t work at all. Even the signals from the keyboard were different from IBM’s, which drove software developers crazy and was one of the reasons that only a handful of software houses produced 2000-specific versions of their products.
Today the Model 2000 is considered the magnum opus of Radio Shack marketing failures. Worse, a Radio Shack computer buyer in his last days with the company for some reason ordered 20,000 more of the systems built even when it was apparent they weren’t selling. Tandy eventually sold 5,000 of those systems to itself, placing one in each Radio Shack store to track inventory. Some leftover Model 2000s were still in the warehouse in early 1990, almost seven years later.
Still, the Model 2000’s failure was Bill Gates’s gain. Windows 1 was a failure, but the head of Radio Shack’s computer division, Jon Shirley, the very guy who’d been duped by Bill Gates into doing the Model 2000 in the first place, sensed that his position in Fort Worth was in danger and joined Microsoft as president in 1983.
While Radio Shack still sells computers (at least for a few weeks longer) the company’s computer heyday peaked around 1980 — 35 years ago.
Mobile phones offered the company a lifeline over the past decade but the positioning was all wrong. Those 1000+ Radio Shack stores that are rumored to be going to Sprint, for example, will represent the primary point of retail contact between the wireless carrier and subscribers valued by Wall Street at more than $2000 each. Sprint has far more to gain from each Radio Shack location it takes over than Tandy could ever have hoped to get from selling us batteries and speaker wire.
Where Radio Shack could no longer operate a profitable enough business in the age of Amazon Prime, for Sprint there’s still real value in neighborhood locations.
Ah the old trash 80…those were the days!
Bob, nice. I think another part of Radio Shack’s demise was the shift to big box retail stores. As consumer electronics become more expensive Radio Shack’s 1000’s of small stores could not sell enough $20 items to stay afloat, and they couldn’t afford to carry a large inventory of $500 – $1500 computers, TV’s, etc. As the consumer electronics industry changed, Radio Shack needed to move to few, bigger stores with much higher traffic. They didn’t.
.
For many, many years Radio Shack was one of the best places to get very specialized parts for electronics. You could go into a store and order a belt for a turntable, pay for it, and the part would arrive in your mailbox a few days later. Any part you could imagine you could get through Radio Shack. As great as this service was, they never, ever made it available through the Internet. Radio Shack could have made a fortune with the Internet. They missed that opportunity too. Even today it is very hard to find and order stuff from their website.
.
You mentioned the Raspberry Pi. They’re making 100,000’s of them and they’re showing up in schools all over the world. This would have been the perfect new product for a company that had 1000’s of local retail locations. They missed this opportunity too. BTW the new 2.0 Raspberry Pi was announced a week ago. I think we’re going to be hearing a lot more about it in the coming months.
.
I am reluctant to blame Amazon for Radio Shack’s problems. Sometimes companies mismanaged themselves into very deep messes. Radio Shack has probably done more damage to themselves than Amazon ever could.
.
Another great icon in our society is about to go extinct.
You’re absolutely right about mismanagement at Radio Shack.
.
I remember when you didn’t have to go to Madisound or Parts Express for speaker building materials; all you had to do was go to your local Radio Shack for everything you needed to build your own set of speakers. Or do any sort of tinkering, really. Yes, RS was more expensive than ordering online, but it was nearby and it was available.
.
In my opinion, RS’s end truly began when they were slow on the 386/486 bandwagon. They were selling 8086 machines and trying to compete with 286 and 386 machines, and they didn’t have the price factor on their side. They got rid of their car stereos, their speakers, their audio equipment, and concentrated so much on selling cell phones that they neglected their base customer, the tinkerer.
Buying a cell phone at Radio Shack was embarrassing. They were clearly inexperienced with the process. It took them over twice as long as anyone else. I get some nice discounts through my employer. Radio Shack didn’t know how to apply them, they didn’t know who to call for help. It just went on and on and on. Their final idea was to sell me phones and plan at full retail, then have ME go to my cellular carrier to get it all fixed after the fact. Both BestBuy and my carrier had stores within walking distance of the Radio Shack. I ended up driving across the street to BestBuy. 30 minutes later I left with 6 new phones and everything was done right.
I don’t understand how it works that if you get discounts through your employer, that a generic retailer is likely to have the ordering systems available to it, to sell you those deals?
Then again, the maddening way cellco retail stores owned by carriers in the UK used to tell me they wee unable to help with anything to do with their own parent network, I am not sure anyone wants to spend the time integrating retail with the options in the various channels.
My point though, is why you would expect $retailer to figure out a special option discount like that? Is this sort of thing more common than I imagine?
I truly am sorry for your experience. As a current Radio Shack employee, and an assistant manager at that, I know my Senior Manager and I always make sure our employees are up to date on how to do things and that if they find something that they don’t know they have the tools and knowledge to find the information they need.
I do agree on some of the things in this post though. My store is quite proffitable and we work hard for that. I go into some other Radio Shack stores and they don’t know what they are talking about or just don’t provide good customer service. This is do to many reasons that frankly aren’t going into but to a certain degree it has to do with those employees/managers caring enough to push. I have bad days. My employees have bad days. But thats no reason to push that onto the customer by providing bad customer service.
Unfortunately your story is not an isolated one. While we select our employees with care I feel like other stores just hired ‘Joe from under the bridge’ because its easier or… Honestly… who knows what their thinking is and either way I think those managers need to step up their game. Customer service is key and many stores were treating it as secondary and fortunately most of those are now closed. All thats left are stores that are decent to excelent and unfortunately its too little too late for the rest of us I fear.
Along with the hobbiest section shrinking. I agree that that section in particular should have been kept much larger. As a hobbiest myself I find it quite sad that less parts are carried there and that the price has risen considerably.
~W
and then there was the CoCo….and the re-branded Sinclare or Timex… or what ever it was
Fantastic story Robert! I did not know that Steve Leininger from The Byte Shop designed the TRS-80. A TRS-80 Model 1 was my first computer. My Dad traded a used shotgun for it.
[…] Remembering Radio Shack With Radio Shack having declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with hundreds of stores closing and others possibly becoming Sprint locations, let’s take a moment to look back at the important contributions the company made in the early days of personal computing. Charles Tandy started the Tandy Leather Com … more info… […]
In 1983, a Model 1 with 48K and an Exatron Stringy Floppy was … sublime.
There was a time I would have killed (or at least maimed) for an Exatron Stringy Floppy!
If they’d offered better prices or better quality for the price on parts and accessories, I, and I suspect many others, would have spent a lot more there than I did over the years.
Apparently the people who knew what they were doing and the ones who didn’t alternated days on which they ran the company without any veto power over each other.
Worst customer service ever. I couldn’t walk out of that place without being badgered to death about buying something else. Took over an hour to buy a new iPhone. I ended up avoiding the place like the plague.
A sad story but true in so many ways. I agree with John that the big box stores played a bigger part in the ultimate demise of the Shack, but I always thought their biggest missed opportunity was the maker boom. If they would have reasonably priced their Arduino and Raspberry Pi kits, coupled with 3D Printing (and maybe even doing renders as a service – send the file, pick up the 3D model when we email you) and Home Automation could have repositioned the Shack in a more honest to their roots sort of way.
I was just in the store a week or two ago and while I’m lucky enough to have a large, old school electronics store with hard to find parts and knowledgeable staff in my area, I’m going to miss going into the TandyCraft/Radio Shack stores and looking at what we thought was “the future”…
Excellent point Robert. The maker boom would have been a natural fit for the old Radio Shack. I also think they could have done reasonably well joining the STEM bandwagon. Promoting everything STEM (the maker movement fits this) could have made them a darling to the govt. and education sectors.
I’ll miss the Shack. I started working at my local stores back during the TRS-80 and CoCo days. I remember the 2000 and the slow transition to emphasizing TVs and other expensive consumer electronics. The painful inventory days are still a memory as are the friends I made back then.
Truly a sad moment. I think I have to go find a Tandy leather store to rekindle the old memories of tooling leather with my dad at the kitchen table.
Tandy created at least three big box stores. Incredible Universe, McDuffs(stereos and appliances), and Computer City. They had many attempts to get the big box store concept right and failed miserably each time.
Tandy also owned “The Edge in Electronics”, which were mall based electronics stores.
My first bought computer was the TRS80 Model 1, 4K memory, monitor. In Canada at the time it was a steal at $900! Before the warranty was up, I opened it up and added the 16K memory ‘mod’ plus the lowercase ‘mod’ (from Wayne Green’s 80-Micro magazine. at one time I had every issue from 1 ’till they folded). I also bought a 3rd party expansion board and populated/soldered it myself (and it worked). I had it until we moved and it got donated somewhere along with tons of other hardware.
I kept and still have my TRS80 Model 4P. That was the best machine they ever built, in my opinion. I still have all the manuals (even the hardware manual) and all the software. It still works just fine!
To be fair the $35 for Raspberry PI is just the card, you need to add, a power cord, sd card, HDMI cable and either a cat5 cable of an wifi card (and a keyboard and mouse). So the actual prices to get a Pi up and running can be close to $70-80 or more depending on the kit you buy. I think the issue is that Radio Shack is not Radio Shack any more. I went into on a few months ago in search if some parts for a Raspberry Pi project and found virtually nothing. I only went cause I did not want to wait for the 2 days it would take to get the part off the internet. I ended up waiting.
As Sprint has discovered they are a cellphone store, not the hobby store they use to be. I’ve missed them for a while. sad
The real transformation in Radio Shack dated from right around the time they started selling a lot of the TRS-80 computers. I’m going to say 1983/84. What apparently happened was that the store staff were placed on commission. The effect was that if you were not looking at a big-ticket item, you were invisible to the employees — unless the store just happened, right then, to be empty except for yourself. Radio Shack was outstanding (among all retail, of any kind) for customer service, up to that point. It reversed overnight and never recovered.
I absolutely agree with the comments that Radio Shack killed itself when it put its salesmen onto commission, so that many were only interested in big-ticket items, but mostly the problem was when it stopped stocking everything for the hobbyist (or even the professional in need of a quick part). I visited Radio Shack many times looking for esoteric $2-$5 stuff that I did not want to pay $6 in shipping for, and sometimes left with more expensive items as well. I knew I was spending more than on-line or other stores but the convenience is always worth a few dollars (how much is your time worth? how about your fuel, tires, etc?).
I did work on commission myself for a time, selling shoes, but I also had a good salary behind it, so the commissions were gravy. So I’m not sure how large a role the commissions played. I stopped going to Radio Shack when I realized that it invariably meant spending an hour behind a customer buying a cellphone, or leaving my carefully sought out items behind on the counter, with nobody saying, “Hey, hold on, can I help you?” or “I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes.”
Funny enough I was just discussing with my Senior Manager the other day that if RS took us off commision and just raised our base pay I bet the stores would do better. (Not to mention that more skilled people would apply and it wouldn’t be ‘Mike M. from under the bridge’)
~W
Our local Radio Shack has been a great source of cables, jacks, cable adapters, etc. for computer, audio, and TV applications. When I installed a TV antenna to get rid of Comcast, they had the amplifier I needed. They even stocked the mast mounts. When I got an iPhone 5s from the ATT store, I found I could not transfer my Contacts from my old Sony Ericsson phone due to Apple not accepting the vcf format. The manager at the local Shack had a device that could bridge most any two phones and transfer the data. She saved my bacon, even though she hadn’t sold the phone. I will be sorry to lose them. No one in our small town will fill their niche.
Bob, I seem to remember paying $599 for my Model 1 (no expansion interface), not $199. I still have the computer, and a “backup” I bought in college in the garage. Should power it up and show the kids. (Wikipedia also mentions a $600 price)
Don’t forget the Model 1000 “portable computer”. Not very useful for business, but was great for researchers doing data entry.
I think Bob meant that the cost to manufactor was $199.
The Model 1000 was an excellent IBM PC clone (better than the 2000 Bob mentioned). The portable you are referring to is the Model 100.
I was in a RadioShack about three months ago. My external backup drive on my Mac was having problems. The Apple Genius Bar in the mall quickly tracked down the problem to a bad USB3 cable. However, Apple doesn’t sell a USB3 cable, so the Apple employee told me to try the RadioShack in the mall.
The employee first showed me an HMDI cable. From there, things got worse. It took about 15 minutes for the store manager to figure out that I wanted a COMPUTER cable (despite the fact I showed him my Mac, the drive, the cable, and how they all fit together). Computer cables were on another wall in the shop. We did find a USB3 cable for $75. That happens to be the same price of a USB3 cable at Costco — except Costco’s USB3 cable would also come with a free 1.5 Terabyte external hard drive.
A local computer shop had the USB3 cable I needed for $5. I don’t think I’ll be missing Radio Shack all that much.
Sadly you can walk into a BestBuy and have an equally difficult time finding an USB cable. When you do the price will probably be enough to make you walk out of the store empty handed. I don’t expect stores like Radio Shack or BestBuy to have the lowest prices. I do expect them to offer things like cables at a reasonable prices that don’t insult their customers. If a cable wholesales at $3 price it at $10, not $50. At $50 you will sell exactly 0 cables and alienate every customer who walks into your store looking for a cable.
.
It has never been easier to find out the prevailing market price for merchandise. It has never been easier to find firms who can supply those parts at a good wholesale price. This isn’t rocket science. This is massive laziness and/or indifference on the part of the retailer.
[…] https://www.cringely.com/2015/02/11/remembering-radio-shack/ […]
I can’t help wondering if there’s a market for retail outlets with Raspberry Pi and Arduino components. Radio Shack made it when computers were still a hobbyist niche and I wonder if another hobbyist niche could have saved them.
Never saw a pi in Radio Shack, unless there is one stuffed in that $80 box of wires. Arduinos, yes. I nailed the joint last Friday, before ham club. there was surely nothing left except a bunch of shields and “game controller” ~inos, but I got what made sense. I’m late to that party, but I have a SI570/arduino project on the bench, and have several others in thought mode.
had a lot of gaps that have developed in the parts bins, but I’ve filled a lot of them from 40 to 80% off.
[…] https://www.cringely.com/2015/02/11/remembering-radio-shack/ […]
A beauty that TRS80, running applications in BASIC !!!
And yes, I have a lovely tiny Pi. It’s a beauty of these days. I got it from a local store (over the net of course) for about U$S 100 + Micro SD card (about U$S 30) + a wire (USB to MicroUsb). The rest I did myself, case included. The output -for now- are a bunch of BC548 I had since more than 30 years ago, and some LED’s, + a brand new breadboard, and some wires, and some adaptor for the Pi’s GPIO to the breadboard.
For the rest, I use a notebook or my desktop to get in the Pi through ssh, and I turn on/off the LEDs on the breadboard from a web page written in PHP or in C (not in python, ’cause I don’t like it) from the Pi.
I love my Raspberry Pi (and it says “Made in the UK” … smart brits, makes me like the Pi even more).
BTW: Bob as an IT journalist/writer/author/thinker/reporter did you wrote a word about this wonder ? Would you tell me why not ? It is good news. Good IT news.
Ahh yes, Radio Shack.
.
Those disappeared in Canada a few years back and became “The Source”. They still sell some electronic components but not as many in the old days.
.
I always thought Radio Shack was the most backward-run computer/technology store ever.
.
For a place that sold computers, they should have used them themselves, but instead, they always did their invoices by hand on those carbon-copy forms.
.
I’m surprised they lasted as long as they did.
.
Nevertheless, in my youth, Radio Shack was a fun store at which to spend time. Lots of interesting gadgets for a techie teenager to find interesting.
It’s funny how Canada kinda led the way on that, Radio Shacks turned into the Source by Circuit City, and then when Circuit City went bust, the chain was bought by Bell to pretty much do exactly what Sprint is now doing in the States, turn them into a cell phone store with a few associated bits and bobs to take up the extra space.
I remember writing simple BASIC on the computers in the very early days and impressing the guys who worked at the local Radio Shack. A few years later, as a high schooler, ready to join the work force, I asked for a job application and was told that you had to have a college degree to work at Radio Shack.
In the years (ulp, decades) since, I’ve seen it go from bad to worse – continuing to sell and more of its own no-name products (which I perceived to being inferior) to selling simple remote controlled-toys that looked like something your typical geek or nerd would look down on as a child’s toy. The few times I went to their website looking for a unique item, I was stymied by a poor website experience, the inability to determine if what they were selling would meet my needs, high costs for the product and shipping or an inability to even find the product on their site.
We are seeing resurgence in the hobbyist engineer, from Little Bits to Maker to 3D Printers to crowd-funding. Radio Shack pursued instead sold the same phones and remote controlled toys you could find at cheaper kiosks in the mall concourse and electronics with names no one had heard of. Had they continued to cater to the makers, they might have had a far different future.
It’s been years since I’ve shopped in a Radio Shack (and rarely go to malls), but still a little sad to see them go.
I was the founding editor of 80-Micro which helped the massive aftermarket in peripherals take off – then moved to IJG (the “Other Mystery” book publishers) and Exatron (“Stringy Floppy” people).
My publishing system was based on a Model II with 64K of RAM and an awesome 1MB of disk storage (spread over 4 floppy drives!). Tandy even ordered 10,000 of one book which retailed for $29.95.
Jim,
Thanks for a lot of good years in my mid-to-late teens. I remember reading 80-Micro and hand-keying in programs at night. Thanks to the Internet, I’ve been able to thank a lot of the pioneers of that age. When I was a kid, Dennis Bathory Kitsz’s The Custom TRS-80 and Other Mysteries gave me the knowledge and courage to disassemble perfectly working, very expensive electronic items, to add improvements, and to put them back together. The TRS-80, that book, and 80-Micro set me on a wonderful journey.
Thanks!!!
Radio Shack appeared over here (in the UK) in the late 1970s under the name of Tandy. And had some initial success because they were the only high-street electronic components retailer, There were other walk-in shops, but most of them were in London. Even Maplins were mail-order.
Despite that I stopped using Tandy quite soon, mainly because the tools they sold were complete and utter junk but high-priced with it. I made the mistake of buying a sheet metal nibbler to cut square holes in an alloy front panel: I think it lasted about 30 minutes and certainly didn’t finish the first cut-out. You had to watch their transistors and diodes too because they were not above selling dead ones.
Tandy didn’t last: their last shop had closed its doors by the end of the ’80s.
Meanwhile, Maplins expanded from pure mail-order by opening a chain of retail stores and making an internet appearance during the dot-com boom. Unlike Tandy, their staff generally understand their stock, prices are reasonable and the business is still expanding, though there are signs of a move away from components to plug’n play home electronics. They were the first to sell RaspberryPis over the counter in the UK and they still do so.
I had a little card that entitled me to a free Tandy battery every month. Eight months later I had enough D-size batteries to power my boombox! (…for about an hour, because the batteries were utter junk).
I got my start in service at the Radio Shack in Orange, Ct. in 1963. My sisters home room teacher had the service contract and I did as much of the work as an aspiring 13 year old could do. I would charge my mentor $4 to fix a record player, he charged Shack $10 and they charged the customer $30. It didn’t take me long to realize that I was on the wrong end of the deal, but it was the start I needed. Back then they had a very good assortment of parts, although quite often you had to buy an assortment bag to get the one part you needed. I probably still have some of those resistors. It saddened me to watch them chasing customers with bull horns out in the parking lot of that same mall as the other stores died around them.
I bought a Radio Shack T-shirt there yesterday for $3!
Over the years post 70’s every time Radio Shack revised it’s self I ended up going there less and less. Aisles that once were packed with every kind of jack/adapter/plug/switch you’d need they would have. Reducing the available and array of inventory while keeping prices high was not smart. Further just as the Rasberry Pi example did they not know there is an internet/Amazon/Ebay? Sadly for Sears/Kmart the vacuum is still sucking in the dust.
I will miss not the standalone locations, but the “store-within-a store” (e.g. a mini-RS inside Bob’s Hardware) that were common in smaller towns an hour or more from the nearest Wal-Mart.
Sadly, as others have said, even the basic electronic parts they offered had declined in quality to the point I just ordered from Digi-key instead.
There are many of us that got our first electronics exposure through Radio Shack. I probably built every single product kit they had in the seventies (the ones in the red perforated case with the clear cover), and built some of them twice as the first wouldn’t work. That gave me my first taste of electronics, and that excitement continues to this day.
Also the RS’s back then were often staffed by very smart techs, but that changed eventually. I also begged my parents to let me have my first job so I could buy a TRS-80 model I, it’s still in my basement with the cassette storage and 16k ram. RS also had excellent stereo gear through most of the years, and some really good radios as well.
Goodbye Radio Shack, thanks for your inspiration and help on my life’s career, and I’ll miss you.
They were a great place to get a decent car stereo into the early 90’s. Dad still has a Radio Shack stereo (with a cassette player!) in his 89 Toyota pickup. Still works fine, too. Every car I bought got a Radio Shack stereo up until I got my first brand new car in the late 90’s. Got a bunch of patch cables from there, and antenna cables, too. I still have a multimeter I bought there back in the mid 80’s. I should look through my box o’ dead tech to see what else is there.
Too bad Tandy/RadioShack “didn’t take the ball and run with it” – “it” being it’s first portable computer (the first really portable computer?!) the Tandy/Radio Shack 100. Radio Shack loaned me the 100; because, I wanted to see how functional the 100 would be loaded with my 400 page D.I.Y. Home Building Manual – “The Knack Of Home Construction” used in my hands-on home building workshops (what a novel idea loading a text book onto an electronic reader!) Unfortunately I got side tracks trying to get on the original “Internet”; never ever did manage to log on! lol. Imagine if the 100 morphed into a tablet at that time!
I think the TRS-80 Model 100 was not generally that useful. The main thing that makes modern tablets worth it to me is the ubiquitous connectivity, and connectivity was not good back then. In the absence of connectivity, the main attractions were applications and performance.
I had an Epson PX-8 Geneva, which was a successor to the Epson HX-20 from 1981. Radio Shack wasn’t the only company doing long-life portable computers back then. Completely replaced by horrible suitcases running DOS and then clamshells with dreadful battery life until Apple made battery life sexy again.
The Model 100 and Model 200 actually displaced a whole small niche in the computing business — providers of “portable” computers for publishing. Once newspapers got editorial front-end systems that could accept an ASCII file over a modem, a group of small businesses — Teleram, PSI, a couple of others — were started to fill the gap between a reporter standing in a phone booth dictating notes and one who actually wrote the story and had all the keystrokes captured at the same time. Newspapers gravitated to the Model 100 because of the price — a Teleram cost $8,000 in 1982 and the Model 100 cost $1100. (At one point I tried to convince a newspaper accountant that since we had budgeted $8,000 for one Teleram, I should be able to buy seven Model 100s; he didn’t bite.) The Model 100 had numerous disadvantages, but it’s main advantage was that it used AA batteries (available at many fine liquor stores at 1:30 a.m.). A little-known side note: Bill Gates actually wrote the operating system for the Model 100 — it’s said it was his last hands-on coding project. Teleram went Chapter 7 in 1985.
For a blast of the past from the glory days of Radio Shack, check out: https://www.radioshackcatalogs.com
At one point they were requiring all customers to give their name address and phone number to make a purchase.
OMG!
As others have said, “What a blast from the past!!!”
The TRS-80 was my first computer as well.
It launched my programming quest, my return to college, and my new career (which I’m *still* doing) of being a computer nerd.
The one thing no one remembers (or at least mentioned) is the graphic accompanying this article:
Time Trek!!!!!
That was one my favorite games of all time (rivaling Castle Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke Nukem, etc.).
Can’t count the hours I spent playing that game — quite often all night long!
Thanks, Bob!
A TRS80 was my introduction to computers. A mates dad would bring it home from his work over the weekend and we’d spend hours coding dodgy basic program and playing a game called Space Warp, shooting emoticons all day.
.
How long until Bob writes an article about the end of Best Buy?
I like the takeoff on one of their slogans: “You have questions, we have blank stares.”
I bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 programmable pocket calculator in 1980 to replace my HP 25. The iterative nature of the TRS-80 calculator was immensely valuable in my college engineering education:
https://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/sharp_pc1211_tandy_trs80_pc1.html
And let’s pay homage to the Radio Shack catalog of the 60’s. It was full of radio stuff (CB, amateur) plus lots of esoteric trinkets and make-your-own stuff. It was what sparked many a boy’s (including my own) interest in 1st HAM radio, later evolving to everything electronic.
It’s too bad Tandy could not evolve with the rest of the world.
If my memory serves me correct…. in the documentary….Trekkies….. a Trekkie built a home made black vehicle similar to the one that was held the original captain of the Enterprise. He ‘drove it’ to the local Radio Shack to get parts and in the film you could tell the Radio Shack employee found him to be weird and did not want to stand too close to him during filming……
Radio Shack sold the Incredible Universe stores to Frye’s electronics (some at least – e.g. West Sacramento store in Natomas)….. when you went in it was a bombardment of sound and video that left you dazed and confused.
Radio failed to evolve correctly with the electronics market and is now simply dying an ugly death.
I stopped going to Radio Shack when they used to require name, address, phone number for every purchase, cash even. Maddening customer service at that point (couldn’t tell you the decade), but when the experience is infuriating, it takes a heck of a lot to get folks to return. I know I never did…
That was so they could mail sales flyers and catalogs to you. For many stores that did that, I eventually gave them a short fake address. Time is too precious for “walk out” protests, especially since you have plenty of chances to walk out when they don’t have what you need in stock.
I occasionally bought stuff at RS for my job at a large university. It usually took about ten minutes to figure out which account to charge. granted, we’re a big university, but come on. And asking for contact info for every cash purchase was damn annoying.
Bob’s article is actually about Tandy, which acquired Radio Shack. The early history of Radio Shack is here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RadioShack : ” At the time of the Tandy Radio Shack & Leather 1962 acquisition, the original Radio Shack chain was near bankruptcy…Tandy closed Radio Shack’s unprofitable mail-order business, ended credit purchases and eliminated many top management positions, keeping the salespeople, merchandisers and advertisers. The number of items carried was cut from 40000 to 2500, as Tandy sought to “identify the 20% that represents 80% of the sales” and replace Radio Shack’s handful of large stores with many “little holes in the wall,” “
The irony is that at RS the entire emphasis became on dollars per sale. If your numbers were high enough, you got a semi-livable wage courtesy of commissions. If your numbers weren’t, well, you were barely above the poverty line. That devolved into the “if you weren’t pushing a cell phone or something expensive, you were screwed” method of salesmanship.
.
And that emphasis on big ticket sales –and the accompanying badgering by employees desperate to make their numbers– really drove a wedge between the staff and the customers.
Yes, to amplify Ronc’s point, Radio Shack predates the Tandy connection, and it was a major mail order outfit for electronic parts, radios, etc., based in Boston (with a few retail stores), in the 50’s and early 60’s; its principal rivals were Lafayette Radio (which also had retail stores) and Allied Radio (which had no stores, at least not in the Boston area, where I grew up). My favorite was the hefty Allied Radio catalog, which I would pore over for hours and hours.
I think Radio Shack could recover if they sold IBM services in store.
ha ha ha, good one. actually, I think IBM could survive if they sold cell phone cases.
Back in the 70’s and 80’s the computer industry was just beginning and it was all about the hardware. 8086’s and z80’s were all the range then came those new fangled 286 chips, WOW! Hardware was important because it was rapidly evolving. Manufacturers and resellers and magazines were all about the next great pc to come out and so hardware hobby shops were important because anyone ‘into computers’ was probably also into hardware. Computers were the next big thing, the great opportunity creator and everyone wanted in but the only way to be in back then was to really understand them.
Fast forward to today and the hardware is a commodity item. It does not have to be the latest and greatest and even systems that are several years old will run pretty much most software just fine. About the only people interested in hardware any more are gamers.
The result is that the hardware market has been relegated to a hobby/enthusiast market and you cannot run a chain store brand on just that.
It’s very much like the car market.Way back when, if you had a car you had to be a mechanic to make keep it on the road because they broke down a lot and people had no money. As a result there were lots of specialist shops and tuners to support them and make them go faster. Today, cars are commodity items. I am a car guy and into old cars but I don’t think I’ve even looked under the hood of the last two new cars we have bought. They are just different animals and I don’t think the way the PC market has evolved is that much different.
In addition, pretty much everything in such stores is now in a blister pack. Sure RS still has a ‘few’ draws of common discrete components but for the most part if it’s not pre packaged, they don’t have it.
It’s not just RS though that has this problem, I can recall as a kid going to the local hardware store (in the UK) and they had EVERYTHING. 5/16 Whitworth bolt in some odd length, no problem, had it on a shelf in the back room. Today, if it’s not in a blister pack on a hook on the wall it’s not in stock!
Wanted to know the best way to do something? Just as the counter guy, he’d spent his life working with the stuff. Today, it’s some kid out of school that’s too busy texting to actually bother to know how something might work.
Even CompUSA has become a mostly blister pack store and even they have expanded into other areas of consumer electronics just to stay ahead. The reality is that you really cannot survive in a brick and mortar store on just hobby stuffy anymore, especially a specialized hobby like electronics.
CompUSA went bankrupt and shutdown 7 years ago.
when Carlos Slim bought CompUSA, then shut down the US stores after about a year, he retained the Mexican stores. I do believe they have been shuttered a year or two ago.
I grew up in the mall where dad’s music store was just down the hall from the local Radio Shack. I spent far too many hours in there once they got their first TRS-80. However, I did become quite proficient at writing small programs that used BOTH of the two available string variables in BASIC. A$, and B$, I believe they were named.
Heh, I remember spending hours at the mall playing Star Trek on the display TRS-80. I’m surprised they didn’t toss us out more than they did.
My local store made it to the very end, I see…
For the last 20-odd years the front third of the store was dedicated to cellular phones. The middle half was Radio Shack branded merchandise, mostly toys. A tiny area at the back had bags of zip ties, thousands of packs of LEDs, and a row of bagged toggle switches; not much else.
The store personnel claimed they couldn’t get any catalog items in, even on special order. And their demand to know your complete demographic history even for cash purchases was the deal-breaker. When they finally refused to make a cash sale unless I gave them my address and phone number, I picked my money back up from the counter, walked out, and never returned.
It’s sad that a lot of people are going to lose their jobs, but for the last couple-three decades, the wonder has been that they still had a job to go to.
I remember the TRS 80 well. In 1981 I was in the market for my first PC and carefully compared the 80 to Apple. The 80 was FAR superior; it would even do lower case 🙂 for no extra cost.
but during my ruminating, the IBM PC came out and it was all over. Made both RadSh and Apple look bad. I also remember the whining about the “dated” tech in the IBM, and while probably true in the sense of “dated”, it was still superior to the other two (if you could lift it 🙂
I could see the writing on the wall for Radio Shack when all they wanted to sell were cell phones.
I would agree with others that they did not embrace the Internet for ordering and fulfillment quick enough (like many others), and their biggest failure (to date) was not seeing the Maker movement as a return to their roots and supporting it.
As for Bob’s comment about the $121 Raspberry Pi he is comparing apples to oranges. For $35 you get only the Pi, for $121 RS gives you a ‘Starter kit’ with other components as well:
https://www.radioshack.com/make-raspberry-pi-starter-kit/2770196.html#.VN4hREZSiU0
Sure you may be able to beat this price from Sparkfun, Adafruit, or Makershed, but they don’t have stores in my neighborhood, either.
I still have my project books from the 80’s for Op-Amps, 555 timers, etc…. Thanks RS!
First computer I ever used was a Trash-80 in college and that made me switch from Bus. Admin to Computer Science. Then my first job out of college was for New York State Office of Mental Health working at a Psychiatric Center (that’s been long closed) as a programmer. Two points 1. We had a Trash-80 that ran accounting software for the facility. The 80 had a 5-BAY 8″ disk drive expansion for a total of 7 disk drives and a 6-meg hard drive that was the size of a briefcase. Probably over $30,000 in hardware back in the early 80’s when purchased. When turning that 5-Bay disk unit on it would sound like a jet taking off! 2. When the Trash-80 was first purchased, it was a fire-able offense because facilities were not allowed to purchase computer hardware. My boss had purchased it in pieces and coded it as food-processing equipment! When auditors would come, they would take it apart, put it on a truck, and move it around so no one could find it!
David Cassidy went bankrupt today too.
My fave Tandy computer was their pocket computer, which was really a Sharp.
Darn it! I wish I had that back. I’d use it today.
I wrote my first game in basic on a trs80 right in the store. It was a horseracing game. The horses are rectangles. A random number generator chose one horse, on the y axis, and incremented it’s x axis position by 1. You bet on a horse and if it won you got a congratulatory banner message. I was 13 years old at the time.
I’m flabbergasted I actually remember this program in such detail, the memory triggered by your story. Thank you Bob.
I am surprised Radio Shack lasted as long as it has. I recall another institution of the same era – the small privately owned bookstore that went down a similar path.
When I was a teenager – circa late 70’s early ’80s – the nearby strip mall contained two small family owned bookstores which were sandwiched between a Ben Franklin (5 and dime), and a Target store. When my hard earned grass cutting/burger flipping money began to burn a hole in my pocket, I would hop on my trusty steed (bicycle, then later a motorcycle), and set off on a quest for books. Upon arriving at the source, hours of ‘research’ (i.e. reading books for free) would ensue – to find the right book/magazine that justified letting go of my dollars. If one place didn’t have what I was looking for, then I would walk over to the other and peruse the shelves in there. Then B. Dalton books moved in, shouldering itself next to the Target – and within a few years the family owned places went out of business (and the irony there is that a few years later Barnes and Noble also moved into the neighborhood – in the same strip mall – and ended up swallowing the B. Dalton chain as well).
While there was value to me in the eclectic collection of books available at the family businesses and the ability to order just about anything you could think of with friendly help, the prices they had to command to stay in that kind of business priced them out of the marketplace in the face of the big chain stores. This isn’t unique, and has repeated itself in other markets as well (ma and pop grocery stores etc). How many premium services based on high cost convenience can a market hold anyway?
The internet and UPS/Fedex has changed everything. How big of a deal is it to defer gratification, when you can have just about anything bought online delivered overnight if you like? On the other hand, what is society losing in this kind of transaction? A sense of community and interaction, even exercise? On the other hand, people today certainly gain the time that was spent during my formative years going places to find something to consume, thus allowing people to spend their limited free time doing things more valuable to themselves, and potentially others. Pants are optional.
There’s no doubt that Radio Shack’s bad management had alot to do with Radio Shack’s bankruptucy finally putting them out of their misery, but let’s face it….it’s not just Radio Shack. The era of that type of chain: lots of small stores, loyal “hobbyist” base who buys regularly, service-oriented staff who could act as both your salesman and (knowledgeable) consultant, sufficient profit in the products (many American-made) so that the service orientation plus huge parts inventory/availability could be maintained, etc…..that’s a bygone era.
An era that many of us 50-somethings in this industry may look back at with fond and significant memories of Radio Shack being a part of it during our formative years – but an era IMO that represents a long-gone North America that no longer exists.
Cases in point:
DOW Stero
Tower Records
Gemco
Western Auto
Mervyn’s
….and God knows how many other retail establishments with low-midrange pricing that were based on sufficient product profit for good service (even if the stores were small) and convenient location (frequently in malls). That model just doesn’t work anymore in today’s world. Radio Shack in its current form is about as relevant to today’s young consumer as wanting to call 555-1212 on your landline telephone to hear the current time (“at the tone, the time will be……”). Those were the days, eh?
[…] been reading articles over the past couple of days about Radio Shack’s descent into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It’s sad and nostalgic because without Radio Shack and their TRS-80 Model 1 I might never […]
Remember when you couldn’t buy anything at Radio Shack, even for cash, without the salesperson demanding your name, address, phone number, etc.? Yeah. Can you say, That’s “B-i-l-l C-l-i-n-t-on”, “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” …
Radio Shack died for me so many years ago. There’s been a few times over the last 10 years that I’ve had to wander into my local Radio Shack because either I needed some random little thing that I thought RS might have (because I KNEW they had them way back when), or I needed something so quickly, I couldn’t take the extra 10 minutes to drive to the Fry’s across town. It was always a frustrating experience. I’m surprised they lasted as long as they did.
But they’ll always hold a special place in my heart, and I enjoyed reading the history in this post. A lot of stuff I didn’t know!
I’m sorry to see it go!
Realistic had great products — some of my favourites Fone-Bone head phones and a Calculator that today is still second only to a HP 44 plus other stuff and don’t forget the bits and pieces for projects. Where will kids go to get bits to design a new Apple1?
To me, Radio Shack was an important part of my youth. Other than a mainframe at a college where my dad studied, the TRS-80 was the first computer I ever laid my hands on. For a while it was everything I knew about computers. In fact, I can tell you right now, without looking it up, that the video memory for the Model I and the Model III was connected to memory addresses 15360-16383, also known as 3C00H-3FFFH.
I learned BASIC on the TRS-80 in the store. A quirk of school district scheduling combined with our move from Germany back to the USA gave me a nearly six week Christmas vacation in 1979-1980. I spent all my time in the Radio Shack on Greenback Lane in Citrus Heights, CA reading the TRS-80 books. My mom was embarrassed that I spent all my waking hours in the RS, so one day she came in to apologize to the manager. He pleaded with her not to make me leave because I was selling so many TRS-80s just by playing with them and showing people what they could do. At the time, I didn’t even know I was selling machines!
The first time I ever used a computer to solve a real world problem was in that RS store. A man walked into the store with a list of three numbers and desperately needed to know the lowest number all those numbers would divide. At the time I was a 16 year old idiot who had never heard of modulo arithmetic, but I managed to write a program that started at 2 and checked every integer until I found the answer. I don’t know why he needed that problem solved, but solving it was a real accomplishment that solidified my love for computers, a love that would remain until decades later after Microsoft, Apple, and mobile devices ruined everything.
Later, I learned assembly language on the Z-80 and wrote a program that would erase any password that supposedly locked a file on disk. It could also add an impossible password to lock a file up just like commercial software. I never released it but it was fun to write.
Radio Shack lost me when they rolled out the customer information system. They used to refuse to sell me stuff unless I gave them my name, address, and phone number. I walked out of many stores at first, but later gave in because I loved etching circuits and building stuff. Later I ran experiments and found that after buying a 40 cent pack of resistors, I would receive junk mail for six months and I estimated the postage they paid was over $20.
The TRS-80 wasn’t the best computer for very long at all but it was my first and I couldn’t afford my own IBM compatible for many years. Over the years, I saw RS degenerate into something quite pathetic. I’m sad about their demise because of my memories of how great Radio Shack once was.
Just like with Commodore, whose Amigas I also loved to use, Radio Shack deserves to go under.
I loved Radio Shack and I still go there ever so often. Now I mainly purchase computer and phone supplies.
.
I suppose it’s easy to criticize the top management of various failing companies. But it seems that so many of the top dogs simply ignore common sense when making important decisions.
.
Among other things, they should discover and satisfy the needs and desires of their present and potential customers, motivate their employees, managers, and lower ranking officers in a way that satisfies the customers and promotes the welfare of the company, monitor the competition and the changing business, governmental, and technological environment, develop business practices that are difficult for other companies to replicate, keep wasteful expenses and over staffing from developing in the first place, etc., etc. Cripes, this isn’t rocket science for gosh sakes.
.
Some people can get the job done, but a lot of people can’t. Seems like it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. I think that is one of the main problems in the business world.
.
Random thoughts from an old fart.
Should have written and polished this comment in Word before posting it. I had some great ideas but the time for making changes expired.
[…] https://www.cringely.com/2015/02/11/remembering-radio-shack/ […]
I grew up in a suburb just north of Boston. I may be having a Brian Williams moment here, but when I was a kid (1940s) and the family went shopping in Boston, my father and I would occasionally go over to what may have been the original Radio Shack. It was definitely an old-timey radio parts store, and I’d wander around it while Dad picked up the tubes and wires and what-have-you that he was looking for. Good memories, even if misremembered.
[…] Remembering Radio Shack – I, Cringely. […]
I do not quite understand, but I try to learn it by heart… What is this stuff still there now..?
Nice article Bob. I was sad, but not surprised, by the news of Radio Shack filing for bankruptcy. We’d been reading that it was coming. It was just a matter of time. As a kid, and even through college, I used to shop there frequently for things. Like so many have already posted, it was a go-to place for the electronics hobbyist. The people who worked there were familiar with electronics so when you asked them for a 10Kohm resistor, they knew what you were talking about. That stopped many years ago! Most employees working there today are completely clueless to the reason why they were “Radio Shack.” I have to blame that on their ownership/management. Unfortunately they missed the boat on all those tinkerers using Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc and their involvement in that area failed miserably with people shopping elsewhere. How nice it would have been for them to have an active website/forums regarding such topics and selling items at competitive prices which we could purchase or pickup locally. Instead there was nothing. Instead, they went into the mobile phone sales business while still providing batteries, speak wire, and random connectors to the public. I have fond memories of using a TRS-80 back in high school as a student and teacher’s assistant. Great computer (even though I was a Commodore enthusiast). I still remember the trips much later in life which I took with my best friend each Saturday afternoon down to “CompUSA” and then over to “Computer City” to scope out the latest VESA bus video cards and other technology at the time. If I recall correctly, Computer City was a Tandy owned store too. Thanks for the memories. Wish it could have ended differently for them. I would have liked my young son and other generations to experience them as we all perhaps did at one time. RIP Radio Shack
During the era of dial up bulletin board systems there was one Yugo driving lady in the neighborhood who ran a BBS on her Trash-80 with a huge external 5mb hard drive about the size of a 12 inch LP record. The setup ran so hot she had to run it with the covers off and a box fan aimed at the innards, but it ran and kept us geeks dialing in. Last year I got the bug to restore some 70’s vintage radio gear. I couldn’t find the parts needed (mostly electrolytic capacitors) at the local Rat Shack but I could find them on eBay, sold by Rat Shack with free shipping and priced lower than what was available on the Rat Shack web site.. go figure. As a kid I grew up being taken around to the local Lafayette store where my Dad would buy EICO kits and 12AX7 powered norelco stereo reel to reel tape recorders. When we moved out of that area we moved onto the local Radio Shack, battery of the month cards, lifetime tubes, and odds and ends. I ended up with their reliable HTX-202 HT’s and GRE manufactured PRO-2005 police scanners. So much of what they had was in my mind overpriced even at half the price, but if you needed it now that is where you went. I stopped going to Rat Shack very often when the sales droids available no longer knew the difference between RG-8 and zip cord, they tried to charge for annual catalogs, it seemed like cell phones were the only thing they sold. Amazingly one Shack store will survive in my home town. The one in the mega mall will fold, probably due to high rent and the proliferation of cellphone kiosks. Radio Shack, You got questions? …so do we!
Ahh . . . . , the good old days of 1982.
.
My second IT job, after a high school summer job spent pulling coax cable for mainframe process control computers in a steel mill, was as a computer operator for a Rube Goldberg designed setup. We linked line mode, dumb terminal, text editors on a SWTP minicomputer to an IBM 370-148 via a TRS-80 Model 12 acting as a peer to the mini and a Bisync 3780 terminal to mainframe.
.
Totally stupid, but it got rid of the punched cards they were drowning in and down the road through many strange turns, eventually led to half a career at IBM.
.
I went to a 1969 film and discussion last night. No one else in the audience had any idea what a punch card or 029 key punch machine even was.
.
So, the world got rid of Radio Shack and IBM got rid of me. All in the same week.
Some kind of weirdly appropriate synchronicity in that, I suppose.
NASA still uses punch cards.
Hey Bob,
Interesting insight, although I think it’s hind-sighted to blame RS for missing the IBM compatible craze. Hell, even IBM didn’t see that coming (it was those rogue engineers down in Boca who did). The guys in Boca pitched the PC to Armonk as a 3270 terminal frontend (and got away with it). In the 80s, everybody was doing proprietary boxes…anybody remember the DEC Rainbow PC?…..(My friend Matt added Kaypro and Wang to the list. Probably the most notable was Compaq, who still required a Compaq-branded DOS boot disk to install Windows 95 even in 1998.)
That Kaypro “portable” weighed in at 65 lbs!
It had two floppy drives so I wouldn’t get “floppy elbow,” which was a real affliction plaguing many admins who sat in front of those machines for hours every day. It also had a tiny green tube, hilarious by today’s standards.
It’s CPM based document formatting features were in many ways superior to modern Microsoft Word.
I also owned an NBI word processor/computer from back in the 1980’s, built in Boulder, Colorado… another proprietary machine. It was the first machine to deploy brand-new fast SRAM (25ns when all other SRAM at the time was well over 100ns & the industry standard was 180ns). Compared to other machines, that NBI was smokin’ fast…
[…] writer Robert X. Cringely analyzes the rise and fall of this enterprise in a brief article Remembering Radio Shack. On the CNBC site, analyst Charles Fearon (author of “Dead Companies Walking”) offers a one […]
“We must assume that the company was filled with managers who just did not have what it takes to make money despite having thousands of outlets to sell stuff.” https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2476532,00.asp
The trash 80 Coco was my entry into the computer era, and was arguably responsible for my current career.
.
Heck, I even had two programs published in The Rainbow magazine. Those were heady days, soldering 32k chips together to get 64k and hacking roms to get infinite lives.
.
I still think the 6809 was one of the most elegant chips out there, it’s assembly language being FAR superior to anything Intel had.
.
The missteps Radio Shack made along the way we’re maddening, and cheap. People don’t mind paying more, but there had better be value, and towards the end (heck, even the middle) the value just wasn’t there.
.
And for what it’s worth, the Model 100 portable had one of the best keyboards I’ve ever used, mobile or otherwise. As I write novels now primarily on my iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard, I miss the wonderful feel of those tactile keys.
With respect to Radio Shack :”missing out” on the trend to big box CE retail, “failed to execute” might be more accurate? Tandy was very much the driving force behind failed CE chains McDuff’s, Computer City and the Unprofitable Universe.
Maybe the first one wasn’t strictly speaking big box but all three were spectacular failures.
Incredible Universe really tried to push the envelope with $160,000 in house stages at each location; the employees were called “cast members” too. This was all supposed to be the personal wet dream of the same CEO that worked the software deals with young Bill Gates too.
IE pulled the plug on December 26, 1996 with two brand new stores that had just opened up for Thanksgiving weekend. So I’ve always assumed that their bottom line figures for that XMAS season were not all that difficult to interpret?
i so wanted radio shack to survive. Watching over the years as the hobbiest section got smaller and more insanely priced. the chance of walking out with what you needed less and less.
I went in a few weeks back for about a dozen female spade connectors for some speakers i was building. Oh what clever packaging they had. I could buy a multi size assorted pack of male and female connectors. To get the count i needec i would have to 5 or 6 packs At around 25 or 30 bucks. No needed to think about it as they only had 4 packs in stock. Went to harbor freight and got what i needed.
Companies come and go. They grow, they dominate, they decline. It’s the natural cycle of things. Some day, we’ll be talking about Microsoft in the same way. And when some genius brings an ultra-disruptive technology to the market, the same goes for Apple.
A lot of information summed in the post – thumbs up. Best wishes, Storage Holloway Ltd.
[…] Obituário por Robert X. Cringely […]
Swietny blog, widze po postach, ĹĽe myslimy o zyciu podobnie:)
uは検査ものを得る期待するものを得ることはありません！ 必要持っている必要がありますあなたは、いくつかは、私のポストに招待するためにウェブログを？こんにちは