Boy, do I miss those catalogs, and that's not just the nostalgia talking. Flipping through the parts, tools, and accessories is perfect project idea fuel, and if you've hit a frequent/current snag working on something, the color photos and well-written descriptions may present the perfect tool or component for solving the problem.
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.
I can't put my finger on it, but there was something more accessible when you had a physical catalog in your hand. I am not knocking modern online catalogs, which are great when you know what you want. Take Digikey, for example, often I don't know exactly what I want, but only roughly. It was so quick to just flip through the pages in the correct section of the catalog and zero in on it. The search features we have on Digikey's website today are excellent, but I can't help but feel they are still a little slow in many circumstances. Maybe it is just my age. EDIT grammar and a missing phrase.
I echo this experience. Also, thumbing through the catalog, you built a mental library of parts, so you could visualize an idea for a circuit or gadget. Same with "reading" the IC databooks.
A drawback was that the Radio Shack catalog was curated, and therefore, outdated.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.
Radio shack is at least indirectly responsible for me disassembling ( and sometimes successfully reassembling) most of the electronics in the house growing up. The tools and DIY gear they carried enabled me to learn and build electronics.
I'm still salty about the bafflingly stupid decision to become little more than a cellphone store.
Same! I took apart so many electronics when I was a kid. In retrospect, I really have to appreciate my parents putting up with this. Fortunately, I didn't permanently destroy anything... most of the time. Radio Shack was paradise for me in terms of being able to fix stuff and also build my own electronics. I built an AM radio transmitter from scratch using Radio Shack parts. That made my 11 year old self feel like I had discovered fire.
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.
>I'm still salty about the bafflingly stupid decision to become little more than a cellphone store.
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.
The ability to have those parts was lost without the access and distribution enabled by widespread internet.
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.
Microcenter still does but it costs 50% more for worse quality parts and the selection is still not great. Handy if you need flux or solder in a pinch though
My recollection is that they got out of the computer business after a very serious embezzlement case left them kind of broke around 1990, and that was the beginning of the long tailspin, but I can't find a reference to the exact story.
They didn't quite hit the right tone in their other markets either. It's hard to pay rent selling $2 packs of components. Computers were ok for a while, especially at the beginning, but not selling. They didn't want to compete on TVs. Hifi gear seemed a shrinking market. I'm not sure what I would have done differently in their place.
Right plus that was the transformation that was happening that they didn't follow - electronics and gadgets out of the mall and into big box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City.
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.
I'm not sure what I would have done differently in their place.
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.
Some of my earliest memories are at a Radio Shack trying to convince my dad to buy me an RC car. Eventually we switched to Fry's (where I bought and built my first computer) but that died too... Now there's a big hole in the bay area and I am probably one of the last people to have that sort of childhood staple. Although, Microcenter might be a worthy replacement once it's done.
Last time I was in the bay area, I went to Central Computers, and it fills a lot of the niche that Microcenter offers elsewhere in the country. It's one of the few places I can find Raspberry Pis at MSRP (without the high shipping prices from online retailers), and it has enough worthwhile parts for you to build your own PC if you wanted, too.
Santa cruz Electronics (Bay Area adjacent) sells them as well as passive components and NTE chip replacements. I even went there a year ago to buy a passive SCSI terminator- the guy went in back and came back with a dust covered box marked SCSI $5/per and let me dig for what I needed.
I love Central Computers. We needed some weird cable to connect 2 very different devices and I grabbed a coworker to take along for the journey. He was highly skeptical that they'd have something as odd as we needed. They had an entire aisle section devoted to the genre with different lengths and colors.
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.
I have a Microcenter within biking distance. You are going to hate their prices versus what you can get the exact same product for online. Plus, still no individual electronics components. One of the biggest things I miss about Radio Shack was being able to go buy just the five capacitors I needed to repair something, all housed lovingly organized by value in those sliding drawers.
Yeah, although I am not doing much hardware stuff anymore, I'm thoroughly disappointed in the lack of component stores that just had stuff for makers.
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.
The Radio Shack catalog (and Radio Shack itself) was a hugely influential part of my childhood. My grandfather (Berkeley EE '34) was a huge fan, and one of my favorite early Christmas gifts was the 75-in-1 Electronics Kit, which taught me the fundamentals of electronics. Later, I got my first computer (a TRS-80 Model I), and I would write programs for school assignments, then ride my bike to the Radio Shack Computer Center so that I could print them out.
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 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 have a TRS-80 Model 6000 with Xenix in a closet somewhere. But I've only ever powered it up a few times and seen the prompt... even 20 years ago when I got it at the flea market, it was impossible to scrounge up the 8" floppy disks the thing used. Always meant to explore a little more with it, never did. There's a knockout in the back for an arcnet card... this thing really could be networked with more than just serial/modems. Pretty weird.
Just pure, utter nostalgia fuel. I spent so many hours flipping through some of those catalogs, I still remember what's on the next page on some year's editions. Sad to no longer have them, but now we have 10x as much in Digikey and friends (and probably more!).
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.
I used to get their electronic kits. They came in a plastic box, which was also the perfboard, and it was point to point soldering.
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.
Reports varied pretty broadly, but yes: They were generally "free." (The whole game was meant to drive customer interaction, and making the game pay-to-play would've been even stupider.)
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.)
From the 1979 catalog (the first one featuring home computers - the TRS-80), page 82:
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.
-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.
Absolutely! I miss Radio Shack.. I only got to experience for a couple of years before it closed but my dad used to tell me about hanging out at the Shack with friends as a kid. Wish we still had it.
Not jealous... I worked at a Radio Shack as a clerk. The training program was something else. It took weeks of studying books and taking tests to get "certified."
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.
I worked at both around 94-95. IIRC, RS's commission started paying if you could sell more than an avg $75/hr for a pay period and a bonus rate if you hit $115/hr.
BB made you hit a minimum of like $2000/day if you were in the computer dept.
Edit: the RS I worked at was across the street from a mall that had an RS in it. I very rarely made commission.
Yep. And the giant plastic flashlight giveaways that took like 6 D batteries, and those round doughnut magnets that were fun to buy and sneak into school. Still have them. Fun days.
This is a brilliant website, destroyed by abhorrent UX. Completely unusable on mobile. A link to some PDFs would be 1000x more effective. It makes me long for the simple paper catalogs.
I found it less jarring once I found the sound OFF toggle.
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 torrent on google of course you are safe because good guy big brother google filters out all wrongthink so we can have rightthink like google knows best
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 think there's a trivial wget script that would download each page and pdf-ify it, but I figured I could be lazy and let someone else write it and just reap the rewards without the work.
Yeah I came back to this thread to see if anyone tracked down the source PDFs so I could virtually thumb through some of these on my way home. Can’t get one to load and not refresh itself constantly on my phone.
My deep unquenchable desire for a Realistic PocketVision 2" battery powered portable handheld color television just took over my mind for a minute, despite me browsing the catalog on what would have been considered a mobile supercomputer with a 6" HD screen. Our childhood dreams never really die.
Can you receive television broadcasts on your pocket supercomputer? If not, then: The dream is still a dream. :)
(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.)
When my parents married, my father built a component stereo system by Heathkit, giant speakers included. He was also a DX'er who curated a nice den full of radio receiving equipment.
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!
You, sir or ma'am, need to get a copy of the ARRL Radio Amateur's Handbook. Preferably an old one from the mid-late 80's when building radio receivers (or transmitters, if you're licensed) was still pure analog fun.
Coast Electronics in San Louis Obispo still flys the Radio Shack marque. I didn’t have a chance to stop in, but the yelp pages show drawers of components that might date back to when it was a RadioShack proper.
That is what I was searching for. I had hoped some Uber geeky cell phone store might exist in the area. I was hoping to find a store that specializes in routers over cellular backbones.
Boy, do I miss those catalogs, and that's not just the nostalgia talking. Flipping through the parts, tools, and accessories is perfect project idea fuel, and if you've hit a frequent/current snag working on something, the color photos and well-written descriptions may present the perfect tool or component for solving the problem.
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.
I can't put my finger on it, but there was something more accessible when you had a physical catalog in your hand. I am not knocking modern online catalogs, which are great when you know what you want. Take Digikey, for example, often I don't know exactly what I want, but only roughly. It was so quick to just flip through the pages in the correct section of the catalog and zero in on it. The search features we have on Digikey's website today are excellent, but I can't help but feel they are still a little slow in many circumstances. Maybe it is just my age. EDIT grammar and a missing phrase.
I think the knowledge that the catalog was complete. When researching on the internet one never knows how thorough one’s research is.
I echo this experience. Also, thumbing through the catalog, you built a mental library of parts, so you could visualize an idea for a circuit or gadget. Same with "reading" the IC databooks.
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.
> 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.
Radio shack is at least indirectly responsible for me disassembling ( and sometimes successfully reassembling) most of the electronics in the house growing up. The tools and DIY gear they carried enabled me to learn and build electronics.
I'm still salty about the bafflingly stupid decision to become little more than a cellphone store.
Same! I took apart so many electronics when I was a kid. In retrospect, I really have to appreciate my parents putting up with this. Fortunately, I didn't permanently destroy anything... most of the time. Radio Shack was paradise for me in terms of being able to fix stuff and also build my own electronics. I built an AM radio transmitter from scratch using Radio Shack parts. That made my 11 year old self feel like I had discovered fire.
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.
>I'm still salty about the bafflingly stupid decision to become little more than a cellphone store.
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.
The ability to have those parts was lost without the access and distribution enabled by widespread internet.
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.
Microcenter still does but it costs 50% more for worse quality parts and the selection is still not great. Handy if you need flux or solder in a pinch though
My nearest Microcenter is about 200 miles away, but maps did return a similar local shop I’ll have to check out!
My recollection is that they got out of the computer business after a very serious embezzlement case left them kind of broke around 1990, and that was the beginning of the long tailspin, but I can't find a reference to the exact story.
They didn't quite hit the right tone in their other markets either. It's hard to pay rent selling $2 packs of components. Computers were ok for a while, especially at the beginning, but not selling. They didn't want to compete on TVs. Hifi gear seemed a shrinking market. I'm not sure what I would have done differently in their place.
> I'm not sure what I would have done differently in their place.
Microcenter. Granted much larger and fewer store model, not a slot next to Orange Julius.
But RadioShack was famously cluelessly managed for years.
Right plus that was the transformation that was happening that they didn't follow - electronics and gadgets out of the mall and into big box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City.
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.
Radioshack did try to create electronics megacenters.
Incredible Universe was very similar to Frys and catered mostly to consumer electronics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incredible_Universe
I love the The Onion’s parody interview of Radio Shack’s CEO. It was an epic rant.
https://theonion.com/even-ceo-cant-figure-out-how-radioshack...
> "Even the name ’RadioShack’—can you imagine two less appealing words placed next to one another?”
This made me chuckle.
I'm not sure what I would have done differently in their place.
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.
The real problem here is that all the devices they used to sell got replaced by cellphones pretty quickly.
So what choice did they have to sell the item that replaced most of the store?
Some of my earliest memories are at a Radio Shack trying to convince my dad to buy me an RC car. Eventually we switched to Fry's (where I bought and built my first computer) but that died too... Now there's a big hole in the bay area and I am probably one of the last people to have that sort of childhood staple. Although, Microcenter might be a worthy replacement once it's done.
Last time I was in the bay area, I went to Central Computers, and it fills a lot of the niche that Microcenter offers elsewhere in the country. It's one of the few places I can find Raspberry Pis at MSRP (without the high shipping prices from online retailers), and it has enough worthwhile parts for you to build your own PC if you wanted, too.
Santa cruz Electronics (Bay Area adjacent) sells them as well as passive components and NTE chip replacements. I even went there a year ago to buy a passive SCSI terminator- the guy went in back and came back with a dust covered box marked SCSI $5/per and let me dig for what I needed.
I love Central Computers. We needed some weird cable to connect 2 very different devices and I grabbed a coworker to take along for the journey. He was highly skeptical that they'd have something as odd as we needed. They had an entire aisle section devoted to the genre with different lengths and colors.
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.
I love giving them my business when I can. I hope they're thriving, whatever that means for brick and mortar anymore.
I have a Microcenter within biking distance. You are going to hate their prices versus what you can get the exact same product for online. Plus, still no individual electronics components. One of the biggest things I miss about Radio Shack was being able to go buy just the five capacitors I needed to repair something, all housed lovingly organized by value in those sliding drawers.
Our microcenter price matches major online retailers
Yeah, although I am not doing much hardware stuff anymore, I'm thoroughly disappointed in the lack of component stores that just had stuff for makers.
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.
The Radio Shack catalog (and Radio Shack itself) was a hugely influential part of my childhood. My grandfather (Berkeley EE '34) was a huge fan, and one of my favorite early Christmas gifts was the 75-in-1 Electronics Kit, which taught me the fundamentals of electronics. Later, I got my first computer (a TRS-80 Model I), and I would write programs for school assignments, then ride my bike to the Radio Shack Computer Center so that I could print them out.
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.
MicroCenter is a national treasure I hope we don't lose. I just moved nearby Cambridge, so I'll have to check that one out!
The best part is the computer catalogs.
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.]
First time I've seen it as coming from WE - I suppose due to the unbundling of Bell Labs.
I actually developed business apps (and did sysadmin) on Altos Xenix machines back in the early nineties - they were quite nice.
I have a TRS-80 Model 6000 with Xenix in a closet somewhere. But I've only ever powered it up a few times and seen the prompt... even 20 years ago when I got it at the flea market, it was impossible to scrounge up the 8" floppy disks the thing used. Always meant to explore a little more with it, never did. There's a knockout in the back for an arcnet card... this thing really could be networked with more than just serial/modems. Pretty weird.
> even 20 years ago when I got it at the flea market, it was impossible to scrounge up the 8" floppy disks the thing used.
https://www.floppydisk.com/5point25
> We carry a variety of 8" disks. Please call (800) 397-7890 for details.
Don't even want to know. That's some "the menu doesn't have any prices listed" bullshit.
Just pure, utter nostalgia fuel. I spent so many hours flipping through some of those catalogs, I still remember what's on the next page on some year's editions. Sad to no longer have them, but now we have 10x as much in Digikey and friends (and probably more!).
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.
I used to get their electronic kits. They came in a plastic box, which was also the perfboard, and it was point to point soldering.
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.
I knew Radio Shack was doomed after their introduction of the CueCat [0].
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
Funny how ideas like that were waiting for the pocket computers we now all carry around with us.
They gave it away for free?
Then, they tried to use the DMCA to stop people from writing open-source drivers that would have enabled it to be a generic barcode reader.
There were a lot of heated words on Slashdot about this back then. Now, people would just accept that.
Reports varied pretty broadly, but yes: They were generally "free." (The whole game was meant to drive customer interaction, and making the game pay-to-play would've been even stupider.)
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.)
They MAILED THEM TO YOU. Like AOL CDs. They just showed up one day.
I think mine came bundled with an issue of Wired.
From the 1979 catalog (the first one featuring home computers - the TRS-80), page 82:
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
This is so cool. I just sent to my kids as they always ask what computers/phones/music/etc. was like "when I was a kid".
Are there any online shops that are good for purchasing electronic components and gadgets like Radio Shack?
- Digikey
- 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.
MicroCenter is good too, especially if you can go in person
A little more niche, but tindie.com also.
Posted 36 days ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41359903
That's ok -- any mention of Radio Shack catalogs will always make me smile.
Absolutely! I miss Radio Shack.. I only got to experience for a couple of years before it closed but my dad used to tell me about hanging out at the Shack with friends as a kid. Wish we still had it.
Right on time for me - as I'm looking to identify a certain plug (it appears to be a micro JST)
Is there anything currently similar to McMaster-Carr[0] for electronics? They seem to do the best in terms of a technical parts catalog.
[0] https://www.mcmaster.com/
digikey mouser jameco immediately come to mind but there are more. octopart has a listing
Don't be jealous, but I was a member of the exclusive "Battery of the Month Club".
Not jealous... I worked at a Radio Shack as a clerk. The training program was something else. It took weeks of studying books and taking tests to get "certified."
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.
Imagine working at Best Buy instead, where they managed to sell a cable modem to my neighbor, a Qwest ADSL subscriber.
I worked at both around 94-95. IIRC, RS's commission started paying if you could sell more than an avg $75/hr for a pay period and a bonus rate if you hit $115/hr. BB made you hit a minimum of like $2000/day if you were in the computer dept.
Edit: the RS I worked at was across the street from a mall that had an RS in it. I very rarely made commission.
Yep. And the giant plastic flashlight giveaways that took like 6 D batteries, and those round doughnut magnets that were fun to buy and sneak into school. Still have them. Fun days.
Photo of the Radio Shack Free Battery Club card:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/8f6p9i/battery_c...
This is a brilliant website, destroyed by abhorrent UX. Completely unusable on mobile. A link to some PDFs would be 1000x more effective. It makes me long for the simple paper catalogs.
I found it less jarring once I found the sound OFF toggle.
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.
I hope the PDFs get uploaded to a torrent file on the archive.org site sometime, that would be much easier.
If you look for a torrent on google of course you are safe because good guy big brother google filters out all wrongthink so we can have rightthink like google knows best
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 think there's a trivial wget script that would download each page and pdf-ify it, but I figured I could be lazy and let someone else write it and just reap the rewards without the work.
Yeah I came back to this thread to see if anyone tracked down the source PDFs so I could virtually thumb through some of these on my way home. Can’t get one to load and not refresh itself constantly on my phone.
https://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/flipbook/2002_radioshack_...
That cover is so late-90/early-2000s.
Interesting the brand name was "Realistic" - seems like something you'd have expected to have evolved out of a toys company or something -- https://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/flipbook/1985_radioshack_...
If Argos is your thing: https://retromash.com/argos/
Radio Shack comes from the days of AM radio and baffle-less speakers, when sounding "Realistic" was a somewhat distant goal
I worked at RS in '99/00- at the time "Realistic" branded stuff was RCA produced.
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 still dream of getting that Robie Sr.
God that thing was all My child self wanted but knew we could never afford. It was like the real future for me to play with.
My deep unquenchable desire for a Realistic PocketVision 2" battery powered portable handheld color television just took over my mind for a minute, despite me browsing the catalog on what would have been considered a mobile supercomputer with a 6" HD screen. Our childhood dreams never really die.
Can you receive television broadcasts on your pocket supercomputer? If not, then: The dream is still a dream. :)
(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.)
When my parents married, my father built a component stereo system by Heathkit, giant speakers included. He was also a DX'er who curated a nice den full of radio receiving equipment.
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!
This is fascinating. I just started getting into radios, how they work, how to build them from scratch, history of them, etc.
You, sir or ma'am, need to get a copy of the ARRL Radio Amateur's Handbook. Preferably an old one from the mid-late 80's when building radio receivers (or transmitters, if you're licensed) was still pure analog fun.
Blast from the past my dad bought the the one tube radio kit on page 67 in the 1970 catalog and used it to try and teach me some basic electronics.
Just today I was stunned to see a radio shack show up in my search while visiting Annapolis.
A hedge fund bought some assets out of bankruptcy and now the locations are basically off-brand cell phone stores.
Coast Electronics in San Louis Obispo still flys the Radio Shack marque. I didn’t have a chance to stop in, but the yelp pages show drawers of components that might date back to when it was a RadioShack proper.
In an alternate universe where Radio Shack still lived, wouldn't the real Radio Shack also be selling off brand cell phones?
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.
That is what I was searching for. I had hoped some Uber geeky cell phone store might exist in the area. I was hoping to find a store that specializes in routers over cellular backbones.
I have used this before and think it is awesome.
I wish the site allowed searching by catalog number.
I wish I had access to PDFs of the catalogs — didn't have to use their built-in viewer.
The “psycho light” and super tweeters were two of my favorites from the middle of that era.
The "psycho light" a kind of color organ?
https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-1970s-s-reali...
Spelled “lite”. I thought so but wasn’t confident about it.
Sad to see Tai Lopez never carried on publishing the catalogue :S
Seeing $499 VHS players in 1989 really puts in perspective all the keynesian deflation fear mongering.