Mr. Roach's (and Radio Shack's) story is amazing and largely unknown in 2022. It's interesting to imagine what might have been if Radio Shack (or Commodore, etc.) had managed to be as successful as Apple as a computer company.
It's too bad that Radio Shack no longer exists - they didn't serve much of a purpose as a phone accessory store, but their prior incarnation selling computers, electronics, stereo and TV equipment, toys, educational kits, and components seems like it was was a lot more interesting.
At one of the last Maker Faires, I recall a Radio Shack executive saying that they were planning on adding a DIY store section supporting things like 3D printing, microcontrollers, and electronics kits, but sadly that didn't seem to materialize (and probably it wasn't a large enough market to be successful with thousands of small stores.)
I'd like to think that there's still an opportunity somewhere for small shops like Radio Shack (or larger stores like Fry's) that sell cool and useful electronic stuff (maybe with fast local delivery!) but it's probably hard to compete with Walmart on one hand and Amazon on the other. I'm actually surprised that Best Buy seems to be hanging on somehow.
As a kid, pouring through the latest Heathkit catalogue was a joy, as was rummaging through an old-school Radio Shack store for new stuff to put on the bread board. In later years such expeditions included Fry's in Sunnyvale EDIT: Palo Alto, actually. When Radio Shack put TRS-80s in every store it wasn't long before kids of all ages with a bit of BASIC knowledge snuck loops of obscenities onto those screens before sales staff would finally notice and interrupt. In later years it seemed that every Radio Shack store everywhere had an endless loop of Top Gun or Star Wars videos on endless loop. I cannot help but remember most people calling the TRS-80 the "Trash 80" even though nobody I knew disliked the machines, per se.
> It's interesting to imagine what might have been if Radio Shack (or Commodore, etc.) had managed to be as successful as Apple as a computer company.
I used to half-joke that Radio Shack always tended to be either a few years too late or a few years too early with their products. For example, the TRS-80 Model 16 was a 68000-based multiuser Xenix (Microsoft's version of Unix) workstation in 1982. The 6809-based TRS-80 Color Computer also had a multiuser, multitasking operating system, OS-9, available for it. Meanwhile, over in the original Z80-based line of the TRS-80 Model I/III/4, they had a "luggable" computer, the Model 4P, that would have blown the Osborne 1 away...if it had come out two years earlier. And, their first MS-DOS machine, the Tandy 2000, zigged when the market zagged: it was MS-DOS compatible but not PC compatible. It was also possibly the only computer from a major company that used the 80186 CPU.
There are still some oddities about the Model 4 I remember fondly. The operating system for it was inspired by OS/360, I think, rather than whatever inspired CP/M and MS-DOS, so it had a different flavor -- "/" as the extension separator, JCL files instead of BAT files, and a very different way of handling devices. But it also had device redirection, which was kind of incredible for a machine of its time and capability. Going back and looking at what the last operating system shipped for it, LS-DOS 6.3, could do circa 1983 is pretty interesting -- and also speculating on what might have happened if Radio Shack had stuck with that path. (I can't find the specifics anymore, but there were a couple "SVC calls" -- the API that programs used to talk to the OS -- that were clearly meant to support a multitasking version of the OS that never came to be.)
Anyway, other than Mr. Roach, I don't think they were a very forward-looking company in most respects. It's fun to speculate what might have happened -- one of mine was, what if Radio Shack had bought the Amiga and built a new OS for it around the 68K version of OS-9? They were better managed than Commodore, surely, right? Well, yeah, probably, but that's a pretty low bar to clear. They could probably have kept a Tandy Computers division going as a PC clone maker if they'd played their cards right, but they sold all that off by the mid-1990s, IIRC, and kept missing every boat from that point on.
Ironic footnote: Tandy Leather, the craft company that birthed the once-giant Tandy Corporation, is actually still around.
Last time I was in the town I grew up in, I noticed one of the Radio Shack locations had been converted in a Tandy Leather. I remember as a kid being told that location had been a Tandy Leather store before it switched to Radio Shack. Fun to see it go full circle.
Best Buy made some really good moves about a decade ago that have paid off for them; I think (one of) the biggest is investing heavily in Buy Online - Pickup in Store (BOPIS). After not having shopped there for years due to online shopping like NewEgg and Amazon, I found myself a few times needing something today and being able to put in an order and pick it up an hour later was really helpful. I still don't use them nearly as often as true online competition; but, they are useful for that.
As an aside, some of them have gone to the "Store within a store" concept where, instead of ill-informed blue-shirted kids wandering around aimlessly, you can find yourself in the LG TV section staffed by an LG-trained salesperson who can at least answer general questions about the units.
Tandy, and that computer in the pic with John (Tandy 1000ish-- thier first PC clone), made my childhood. I was lucky enough to have a hard drive expansion card and later purchased a brand new Tandy color EGA monitor with my own money for it. Nothing online, all the time spent learning every nook and cranny of numerous DOS versions, Norton utilities, and BASIC. I spent years (12 to 14) at 3.77mhz and loved every minute of it.
Maybe, but over the last few years I've taken to checking Best Buy's web site in preference to Amazon's for things that seem like they're in the general category of "things Best Buy probably sells." They're usually competitively priced, and occasionally have even undercut Amazon. (This is especially true if you're looking for brands you've even remotely heard of, as opposed to ICEDIO, ORNARTO, JASBON, COOLQO, WTYOO, SINIANL and the like. All of those names are real "companies" on Amazon at the moment, by the way.) And, Best Buy offers something else Amazon doesn't: local stores. I can order something and go pick it up.
I think Best Buy survives in no small part because (a) despite all the jokes about the way they used to upsell overpriced printer cables, they've often had a pretty good selection and decent salespeople, and (b) they managed to adapt to the online world in time to save themselves, which Radio Shack -- and, somewhat incredibly, Silicon Valley megastore darling Fry's -- manifestly did not.
After receiving a “Logitech” webcam in sketchy packaging from Amazon last year, I promptly returned it and ordered the same model from Best Buy for local pick up. The retail packaging was completely different and the webcam itself felt heavier. The price difference was all of about $15… well worth the peace of mind.
That was likely my last electronics purchase from Amazon.
I've had a similar experience with Amazon. These days it's pretty much books or things I can't be concerned about if they are knockoff. Electronics? No way. Too high of chance for grey or black market quality stuff.
My elementary school principal would let me skip class and hang out in the closet of his office where he had a Trash-80. My older brother would never let me touch his Apple][, so I loved that closet, and that computer. My career began there too!
Really sad to hear this. The TRS-80 Model I was the first computer I ever owned in high school. I spend many, many hours programming on it. Taught myself BASIC and Z-80 assembly language on it. Definitely was a major factor in my professional life.
IIUC, common mods/expansions of the TRS-80 Model I (or so) weren't pre-assembled.
A guy I worked for as a kid one time said/joked he got his company's start by finishing people's botched attempts at assembling their TRS-80s. (Though his company also dealt in S-100 bus CP/M systems around then, and he might've been speaking more/also about those.)
Probably the latter. According to wikipedia[1] the Model I was modular but preassembled while the later Model III was an all-in-one integrated system, and Radio Shack provided upgrade and repair services (presumably installing things like RAM upgrades or expansion boards like an RS-232 interface.) Neither machine seems to have included the sort of user-accessible slots that S-100 machines, the Apple II, or the IBM PC had.
> In February 1977 they showed their prototype, running a simple tax-accounting program, to Charles Tandy, head of Tandy Corporation. The program quickly crashed as the computer's implementation of Tiny BASIC could not handle the US$150,000 figure that Tandy typed in as his salary, and the two men added support for floating-point math to its Level I BASIC to prevent a recurrence.
I mean common mods/expansions atop the base pre-assembled system.
For example, the Model I with and expansion box that I used circa 1980 had, for example, a hole drilled in one of the chassis with a homebrew toggle switch in it. I never learned what it did, but I recall the whole thing with the ribbon cable looked like there was still a homebrew/DIY aspect to it.
Perhaps an alternate ROM, memory upgrade, 80 column or lowercase board, graphics upgrade, or??? I wonder!
Radio Shack (and Apple, for that matter) actually made schematics for their computers available, enabling people to potentially repair or modify their own machines – and this was actually practical because of the discrete (and often off-the-shelf), through-hole soldered components.
Talk about "right to repair!" Personally I'd feel a bit queasy potentially bricking a $2700 computer, but then again you could also possibly replace a component if you damaged it.
I think Apple and IBM also included firmware listings. In general vintage PCs seem to be very hacker-friendly, and they're also simple enough so that you can understand the entire system. The closest thing now might be something like an Arduino or bare-metal programming on a Raspberry Pi.
Pi's are fun but they don't really have the spirit of those 8 bit machines. For starters it's way too powerful compared to those machines.
Some of the machines had communities (offline!) who flat out encouraged hardware hacking, from simple things like piggybacking EPROMs and switching them with a toggle switch (as above) right up to hacking together sound processors. Often the documentation was non-existent so curious hackers would trace all the lines on whatever expansion was available and document it themselves.
This was generally on the "also ran" computers (thinking specifically of the Australian Microbee) since expensive US things like Apple 2 or TRS-80 were mostly unaffordable here.
If you want the real deal, the closest thing would be single board kit computers based around a Z80 or a 6502.
Back in the 80s I was told by a university employee that the football coach had three different accounts in the old mainframe based accounting system because his salary exceed the maximum allowed by the salary field, which probably seemed like a reasonable limit when the thing was first written. Bet there were lots of hacks back then to work around what seemed like reasonable constraints made in the name of performance or storage.
My first computer was a store demo unit of an on-the-way-out Tandy 1000 HX. It came with several games, some kind of productivity suite, and A Tandy Bear Christmas.
Remember the screen printer [0]? It had a spinning drum with metal fingers that dragged across a curved sheet of aluminized paper. Sparks would remove the aluminum, leaving the underlying black paper visible.
they didn't seem to be too popular here in NZ, but I remember them in the ads in comic books, I even had a superman comic where superman lost his powers and needed kids with a TRS-80 to help him make calculations! Found it here :- https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Superman_in_Victory_by_Computer
I agree, until the early 80s, while most computer owners I knew in NZ had a ZX81, Spectrum, Vic20 or C64, but there were a few people I knew who had an Australian made TRS80 clone called the Dick Smith System 80 - https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/system-80/
Ah the memories. I loved them. My NSW high school used them (early to late 80s at least) and my friend's dad had one and we got into programming on them. When I wanted my own computer about 1986 that was the obvious and only choice. Experts could do amazing things with BASIC by embedding machine code routines into REM comment lines with POKE statements. I wrote mainly in BASIC, Turbo Pascal, Z80 assembler. I remember trying out Lisp and drawing a Mandelbrot set image on it. They were CP/M. I remember it said "Gary Kildall" on screen as it started up. I was programming on it until 2000! - I never had a computer with a mouse until then.
It was so different pre-internet - I never laid eyes on a book or manual on Turbo Pascal or Z80 assembler. I think I picked up crumbs from computer magazines in libraries.
I was recently asked by a young counter staffer who could not make change without the cash register whether I wanted to buy an extended warranty... on a pack of batteries.
You should have gotten the warranty and then gone back in a month and asked for a warranty replacement "These are defective, I put them in my flashlight and they worked fine for a few weeks, then just stopped working."
The anecdote from cf100clunk is apical and worth spreading (and I do not believe represents a "single isolated case"), but the follow-up J. suggests is not impossible:
a story is known (not verified) of someone who insured a box of precious cigars, but in time smoked them, then requested payment from the insurance - presumably thinking "if one is fool enough to cover consumables, then has to follow consequently": the insurance company sued the insurer for arson.
me too, as a customer I frequently hand over seemingly strange amounts of change on top of a few dollars; goal: enhance the number of quarters I get back for parking meters
I remember this skill being slowly lost as I grew up in the US - then I moved to Germany where grocery store cashiers would specifically ask for extra cents to get simpler change. And now with digital payments on the rise I get to watch it slowly be lost a second time.
