I don't know if they were ahead of their time, or woefulily, even negligently, unaware of their market. I remember going to "the mall" as a kid with my Mom and spending (what seemed like) hours staring, coveting, and sometimes purchasing the blue blister pack ICs; all while she waited patiently to do her shopping. I didn't have the income they were looking for, and was far from their target demographic.
Some time in 1979 my dad paid the local RS a visit with an intent to purchase a computer for the family. After spending an hour in an effort to get some answers from the salesman who, according to my father, was more interested in selling battery memberships, he walked out.
I now recognize and appreciate that, at the time, a $2.5k purchase might have been seen as the exceedingly unlikely result of questions from "just another lookie loo". But if R.S. took even a moment to see the potential of their customer base, I likely wouldn't have awoken Christmas 1979 to an Apple ][+.
The collapse of Radio Shack can be attributed to an obvious lack of sales support. And by that, I mean, for the sales people that they actually hired, what they gave them to sell, and what the operation as a whole needed to do to perform was absurd.
Radio Shack, as a job, was/is a step above fast food, and a step below clothing, in terms of status. If Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons wasn't selling comic books, he'd be a Radio Shack employee (if you were lucky). The people attracted to that job were not serious sales people, and the things they were made to sell were mostly undesirable, or worse incomprehensible without expertise. The store was filled with trash items that sold at christmas and broke by valentines day. All of this, right next to certain niche and high-end items that rarely moved.
Because Radio Shack sold a lot of cheapskate wares, everything bought from Radio Shack felt like a gamble (as the store's very name should suggest). The revolving sales associates had distractions about battery sizes mixed in with thousand dollar sales, so if there was commission to be had, they were still forced to swat flies.
Radio Shack was usually a hole in the wall. 900 square feet would probably be a large-ish Radio Shack. Without zones or departments, every Radio Shack employee was always selling everything, which means they were pulled in every direction, and their motivation landed somewhere in between selling fuzzy slippers that sing Jingle Bells in electronic chirps, and selling sub-par desktop competitors to Gateway 2000, without fully understanding or caring about the difference between an Intel 386 and an Intel 486DX.
Because Radio Shack was a high school summer job at best, or a 9 to 5 career move at worst, it's interesting that they lasted decades longer than maybe most people would have expected.
That is probably true. I hired in for Christmas at RS while at junior college as sales person, around 1980. My experience was, at the time, 6800 machine programming and electronics but not C/S or operating systems. They gave us little to no training, I recall some sales self tutorials on the TRS-80 itself, but it was made clear to us we were there to sell things - and at Christmas it was chaos and (especially non-computer) items were flying off the shelves. I lived in a quite technical town and would get questions like "how many pages of memory" or "memory pages" does this have; when I could only refer to how many bytes, one customer stomped out in a huff. But ultimately difficult questions were to be referred to the regional specialist; knowledge was rare and it was not practical even in our town to have a computer scientist or programmer on staff; but people being people, they wanted answers now. Most were reasonable and those that knew enough about computers to ask the hard questions, say from their work, realized it likely took enthusiasts or specialists to answer - not salespeople. Apparently that changed after awhile, maybe when the Radio Shacks went to "Computer Centers" or some such thing.
Your story is practically the precise opposite of mine. Of course, my parents didn't have the money for an Apple ][. A TRS-80 Color Computer at $400 was a non-trivial purchase for a high-school teacher in rural Western Pennsylvania.
Businesswise, unfortunately, the founder Radio Shack died right before the computer revolution kicked in. Then, Radio Shack had a couple of embezzlement problems right at critical points so they missed the computer revolution and then missed the internet revolution.
And even THAT would have been recoverable had they decided to be "mom and pop" tech support in less urban areas (it took forever for Circuit City and Best Buy to enter certain areas).
CoCo was an extremely nice machine with a lot of software tricks to emulate hardware that wasn't there. 6 bits a/d & d/a with a bunch of resistors and a single comparator, audio in/out and doubling as a cassette interface. Very elegant design.
Did you know that there was an English clone called the Dragon 32? And that it had 64K RAM that was never advertised but that you could use by tweaking some bits in the video chip/memory controller?
I've got my granddad's boxed and mint condition Dragon 32 sitting next to me. It looks so cool and was fun to get his hand-written code working again after over 30 years. I've been meaning to document it all!
Unfortunately I lost all my '09 stuff. Did he write in Asm or something else?
I had a rudimentary random-access storage device going on mine using a Sony TC-FX 33 cassette tape recorder. With a bit of tweaking you could control the buttons from the Dragon and it also had a nifty little optical encoder to indicate 'end of tape' that you could tie to an interrupt giving your a rough idea of where the tape was.
Even with a C120 cassette the storage capacity was terrible but it did work and it was persistent. It wore out tapes like crazy :)
That Dragon really does look mint. Beware of the big caps dying on you and taking the mb with them, it might be safer to replace them pre-emptively that power supply wasn't the best. A huge advantage the Dragon had over the original CoCo was the keyboard, it is really good quality.
> CoCo was an extremely nice machine with a lot of software tricks to emulate hardware that wasn't there. 6 bits a/d & d/a with a bunch of resistors and a single comparator, audio in/out and doubling as a cassette interface. Very elegant design.
It was a wonderful set of hacks. And, since almost everything was software, you had to understand what was going on rather than just magically offload it to a chip that just handles it.
The whole idea of making a dinosaur "roar" drove me down the path of sound effects, audio synthesis, ADC/DAC conversion, Fourier analysis, etc.
And the CoCo had William Barden writing books and articles that were way ahead of anything that you could have rightfully expected.
Yes, the serial port could be added to the 32 as well, the rest was just software (some minor patches to the ROM). Not all Dragon 32's shipped with the 64K chips, and opening one up in the store wasn't an option so a little software test was useful.
We figured all this out long before the Dragon 64 was released, and a friend of mine figured out how to move the basic interpreter to RAM and relocate it. Good times.
I suppose it would not be as fun if the title was "A thrift store of Radio Shack goodies" but the truth is I've seen an example of just about everything they are auctioning off at thrift stores. Radio Shack moved a lot of product and its out there still :-). I don't think it will hit peak nostalgia until 2020. See that way people who were 10 in 1990 and had their lives changed by the neat stuff they could buy there, will be 40 and will be trying to recapture that wonder that has been beaten out of them by 15 to 20 years of CRUD programming.
EDIT: Ok, not the pictures of the executives and the stuff they handed out for sales person of the quarter :-)
and adjust the prices of hifi and other toys to modern values the products seem incredibly expensive.
E.g. the best LP player + radio + speaker package from 1968 cost around $300 - which would be around $2500 today.
Of course you can spend $25,000 (or $250,000...) on modern hifi. But Radio Shack were always aimed at the mass market and not at esoteric hifi perfectionists.
RS seem to have made a lot of money hyping mediocre products that cost maybe a couple hundred dollars to manufacture and selling them for $1000 to $2500 a go.
I'd be fascinated to know what their operating margins were in the 60s and 70s.
Consider that the stuff from that era was typically hand-made, point-to-point soldered or wire-wrapped. There was a lot more labor cost in the manufacturing in those days.
That said, Realistic brand "hi fi" was never that good, and overpriced for what it was.
I'd be more interested if someone discovered a trove of Heathkit stuff.
In those days I'd buy Heathkit equipment and solder it together :-)
I did that with my H-11 (a PDP-11). It worked perfectly first time, and served me well. It was the only computer of mine I got rid of, and the only one worth any money today.
I had some experience building Heathkits, and the instructions were excellent, so I had no trouble at all with it. I later added a 6Mb hard disk drive to it, building my own I/O card and writing the boot loader for it.
6Mb was oceans of space in those days :-) Now I have an 8Tb drive.
Tandy computers, in the early days at least, had a reputation for being high quality at an affordable price. The Model I was often called the TRASH-80, but the business machines, the Color Computer line, and their line of PC compatibles were all fairly highly regarded.
The Tandy 2000, in particular, was not 100% PC compatible, but a) it came out at a time when that mattered less than it would in later years; b) it was much more performant than IBM products that would be released even a year later; c) it was cheap for PC-grade hardware. And the legacy of the Tandy 2000 lives on: the layout of three rows of four f keys above the number keys was first used on that machine's keyboard.
Owners of the TRS-80 called it the "triss-80". It was owners of other computer brands that called it the "trash-80".
My TRS-80 is still in my attic. I learned assembly language from Bill Gates - I disassembled and hand-annotated a significant portion of the ROM. I deeply regret throwing away my commented printout during a purge in my youth. :-/
In general, Tandy PCs were compatible with the IBM PCjr[1]. In fact, Tandy sold far more PCs than IBM sold PCjrs, so later software was often advertised as being "Tandy compatible" rather than "PCjr compatible".
The Tandy 2000 -- their first x86 offering -- wasn't 100% PC compatible. Unlike every PC-class machine, the 2000 was based on the 80186, which precluded hardware compatibility with the PC. Software that did all I/O through the BIOS would still run, but that was thin on the ground even in the early 1980s. Most software had to be specially ported to the 2000, and the only graphical game that I could find that received this treatment was Flight Simulator.
The Tandy 1000, which came after the 2000 and used the same keyboard, was PCjr compatible, and subsequent machines would maintain IBM compatibility.
I used to work at RS (Tandy here in Europe) on Saturdays and even though the stuff was pricey the quality was horrible. I don't know any of the people running the stores back then that had RS hi-fi stuff at home in spite of being able to get it at significant discounts.
There's a lot of rose-tinted nostalgia about Radio Shack. And they were a handy place to pick up cables and other components that weren't always easy to get elsewhere--especially when you weren't sure what you needed. That said, their stereo products were as you say mediocre at best. Pretty much overpriced crap pitched to mainstream consumers who didn't know about or were intimidated by both big stereo gear stores and specialists.
I think the only thing I really miss about the Tandy/Radio Shack era is going ice skating at the Tandy Center in downtown Fort Worth when I was a small child. I got my start in engineering with their kits and Forest M. Mims books, but shopping there was a mixed experience. Talk about a poorly run company.
I also loved shopping there... the items seemed to be obscure, growing up I always wondered who actually shopped there for these items to justify an entire store... but the demand was there, they just didn't figure out how to take advantage of the early-mover advantage
I remember an Archie comics that was distributed at my school where it was basically and advertisement for Tandy computers. Archie, his dad, and the school principal all had Tandy computers that ehy did awesome stuff on.
Well, it beat having nothing and in many towns RS was the only way you were going to get parts. Overpriced and way too much packaging but better than none.
What really bugged me about RS/Tandy is their pull-out from Europe. One day they were still taking in customer repairs and downpayments and the next day they were gone, everything shipped to Nanine in Belgium and sold for pennies.
