Not Trash — A Treasure

I just read an article that Radio Shack stores are closing. The company has been in financial trouble for a long time, but it looks like this is the end…
This announcement shouldn’t surprise anyone that’s been in a Radio Shack store in the past few years, but for people my age that used to buy resistors, capacitors, wire, solder, printed circuit material — and — vacuum tubes from the nearby Radio Shack this is a sad development — almost like losing an old friend.

Radio Shack opened their first store in Boston in 1921 and basically catered to the nerds of the time — ham radio operators, and other electronics “hobbyists.” They sold individual parts, electronic kits, batteries, hi-fi stuff, etc. After a number of years, they were bought by, or merged with, a Texas company — Tandy, and the company became known as Tandy Radio Shack. Tandy was a company that produced leather products and lots of leather kits, like purses and belts. I never got the connection with the leather and never saw any leather products in any of their stores. Radio Shack had their own in-house brands and if you’re old enough, you probably remember Archer, Realistic, Optimus and a few others that I can’t think of right now. Their “brands” always had a reputation for being cheap and a bit cheesy, but most worked pretty much as advertised.

One Radio Shack Product that became popular at the time and was particularly memorable for me (and I think my daughter, Kelly) was something known as a TRS-80. If that doesn’t ring a bell, it was one of the first home computers and was put on the market about the same time as the Commodore PET — remember that one?
The TRS-80 first hit the market in 1977 and was priced at $599.95. The only other “computers” available were build it yourself machines that only appealed to super technical hobbyists. By today’s standards, it wasn’t much of a computer, but it was revolutionary in that it was an all-in-one package and the price was reasonable for the time. The TRS-80 was a big hit — backordered for months.
One could make an argument that the TRS-80 was the most important personal computer of the 1970s and early 1980s.

I bought a TRS-80 in, I think, 1979. The whole concept of personal computers fascinated me and Kelly, who was a little over three years old at the time, seemed just as fascinated as I was. The TRS stood for “Tandy Radio Shack” and the 80 referred to the machine’s microprocessor, the Z-80. I indicated earlier that the price was $599.95. Actually, you could buy a TRS-80 for $399.95, but then you had to supply your own monitor — I don’t think many of those were sold. The $599.95 got you a complete system with Radio Shack’s 12-inch black and white display (made by RCA) 4KB of memory and a cassette tape deck that let you save and load programs — very slowly and somewhat unreliably, but it did work. Even early on, there were a lot of games available for the TRS-80, but probably the most significant pice of software was the Electric Pencil — the first microcomputer word processor.

Kelly picked up computer skills almost immediately — she used the TRS-80 in a lot of ways I never even thought of back then and If I remember correctly she used the machine for at least one science fair project. Before long, she inherited the machine and was the only person her age that I knew that had her own computer in her room.

The TRS-80 was very popular — it was fun and even useful and played a major role in consumer-izing computers that had mostly been utilized by propeller-heads.  But for some reason, it just never took off after it’s initial success. Apple and IBM and even Commodore came along and just left the Radio Shack machine behind. Not sure why, but the machine came to be known as the Trash-80. It wasn’t perfect, but it was probably one of the better PCs of its time. Why it became the Rodney Dangerfield of computers isn’t clear — maybe it was its looks — it looked more like a TV, with a keyboard — which it was. But I don’t regret buying the TRS-80. We never owned another Radio Shack computer, but since the TRS-80 came in our door, we’ve never been without a computer.
And as for Radio Shack, even though I haven’t been in one of their stores for a long, long time, I still have fond memories of the place(s) — a lot of what I learned about electronics came from experiments made with parts from “The Shack.”

Radio Shack, like a lot of us, just got old and left in the dust of the technology revolution. Seems we just don’t need a place anymore where you can still buy vacuum tubes.
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