{"id":451,"date":"2015-02-07T17:25:23","date_gmt":"2015-02-07T17:25:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/?p=451"},"modified":"2015-02-07T17:25:23","modified_gmt":"2015-02-07T17:25:23","slug":"not-trash-%e2%80%94-a-treasure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/?p=451","title":{"rendered":"Not Trash \u2014 A Treasure"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2026
\nThis announcement shouldn\u2019t surprise anyone that\u2019s 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 \u2014 and \u2014 vacuum tubes<\/em> from the nearby Radio Shack this is a sad development \u2014 almost like losing an old friend.<\/p>\n

Radio Shack opened their first store in Boston in 1921 and basically catered to the nerds of the time \u2014 ham radio operators, and other electronics \u201chobbyists.\u201d 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 \u2014 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\u2019re old enough, you probably remember Archer, Realistic, Optimus and a few others that I can\u2019t think of right now. Their \u201cbrands\u201d always had a reputation for being cheap and a bit cheesy, but most worked pretty much as advertised.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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 \u2014 remember that one?
\nThe TRS-80 first hit the market in 1977 and was priced at $599.95. The only other \u201ccomputers\u201d available were build it yourself machines that only appealed to super technical hobbyists. By today\u2019s standards, it wasn\u2019t 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 \u2014 backordered for months.
\nOne could make an argument that the TRS-80 was the most important personal computer of the 1970s and early 1980s.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cTandy Radio Shack\u201d and the 80 referred to the machine\u2019s 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 \u2014 I don\u2019t think many of those were sold. The $599.95 got you a complete system with Radio Shack\u2019s 12-inch black and white display (made by RCA) 4KB of memory and a cassette tape deck that let you save and load programs \u2014 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 \u2014 the first microcomputer word processor.<\/p>\n

Kelly picked up computer skills almost immediately \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

The TRS-80 was very popular \u2014 it was fun and even useful and played a major role in consumer-izing computers that had mostly been utilized by propeller-heads.\u00a0 But for some reason, it just never took off after it\u2019s 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\u2019t perfect, but it was probably one of the better PCs of its time. Why it became the Rodney Dangerfield of computers isn\u2019t clear \u2014 maybe it was its looks \u2014 it looked more like a TV, with a keyboard \u2014 which it was. But I don\u2019t regret buying the TRS-80. We never owned another Radio Shack computer, but since the TRS-80 came in our door, we\u2019ve never been without a computer.
\nAnd as for Radio Shack, even though I haven\u2019t been in one of their stores for a long, long time, I still have fond memories of the place(s) \u2014 a lot of what I learned about electronics came from experiments made with parts from \u201cThe Shack.\u201d<\/p>\n

Radio Shack, like a lot of us, just got old and left in the dust of the technology revolution. Seems we just don\u2019t need a place anymore where you can still buy vacuum tubes.
\n\u2014 30 \u2014<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2026 This announcement shouldn\u2019t surprise anyone that\u2019s been in a Radio … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=451"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":452,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451\/revisions\/452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}