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.
