When Radio Shack was cool…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 13, 2015

It’s funny. As mush as I might embrace change and improvements, there’s still a part of me that still expects the world to be exactly the same as it was when I was fifteen. At least the parts I interact with. When I walk into a mall, a part of me still wants to seek out the once-ubiquitous arcade.

And part of me still thinks I might walk into a mall as part of daily life…

There’s a Radio Shack store in a shopping strip near my house that I pass by almost daily. I go there pretty infrequently (although more frequently than I visit a mall…), and it’s mainly a place to get overpriced home theater and stereo equipment, cell phone accessories, remote control vehicles, battery chargers, and HDMI cables. Although towards the back, I was gratified to see that they still sell fuses, some solid-state electronic components, and – much to my surprise – a couple of electronic project kits for kids.

That last discovery, several months ago, was a pleasant one. When I was a kid, that was what Radio Shack represented. It was a hobbyist electronics retail shop. They had computers (the famous TRS-80s… the “TRS” stood for “Tandy / Radio Shack”), a bunch of electronic gizmos and toys, computer software, electronic project kits galore, and of course a bunch of components and cables for wiring up your home electronics. It was a store I’d visit just to browse. I’d spend hours looking over their catalogs and mailers each year. I had a couple of their electronic project kits, and learned a little bit about electronics that way. Mainly, I learned what would happen to a microchip that was core to one kit if you decided to pour extra power into it via a model train transformer. Oh, and I learned what burned electronics smell like that way, too. You never forget that smell.

I bought parts from the Radio Shack as an older teen to build a device that would transform the electricity from a 9-volt battery into a muscle-curling hundreds of volts for use as a practical joke – or a way to prove one’s macho-ness in the most non-macho, geekly way possible.

Like its sister company Tandy Leather, Radio Shack was a retail store for the Do-It-Yourselfers. And maybe it was what it represented that was so exciting to my young mind. It was the idea that this stuff did not belong inside some ivory tower of academia or inside the white clean-rooms of industry, but there in your garage or basement workshop, or up in the bedrooms of twelve-year-old kids. In that way, maybe it helped instill the “indie spirit” in me. For that, I owe it.

Not enough to buy any more HDMI cables from them, though. I could get two of ’em for the same price from Office Max or Amazon.

But hey, maybe I’ll buy a heliquad from ’em someday or something…

 

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