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As a youngster I became fascinated with the world of electronics after watching my dad pull the back off our old black & white floor-model TV set and remove a vacuum tube that wasn’t glowing, suspecting that that “dead” tube was the reason the TV had stopped working.
I tagged along as he took that tube to our local TV repair shop to have it tested. Sure enough, it was deader than 4 o’clock in the middle of the Sahara desert.
Dad paid the guy a couple of bucks for a replacement tube and we headed back home. I then watched with amazement as he plugged the new tube into the now-empty socket. He pressed the power switch and we watched all the tubes begin to shine with that familiar warm glow, and after a few seconds the TV came to life and started showing a picture. Success!
Needless to say, I was hooked.
My fascination with electronics only grew a time passed. Every time someone decided to trash a non-working radio, record player or other device I would pull it out of the garbage and remove the cover. On rare occasions I could find the problem and fix it, but even when I couldn’t I still learned something.
At the start of my junior year of high school I signed up to take the electronics class that was being offered through our county’s technical school. For the next two years I would attend regular morning classes at the high school and then hop on a bus for a ride to my afternoon electronics class. Needless to say, the afternoons were the highlights of my days.
Our electronics instructor began by teaching us basic electronics, everything from Ohm’s Law to what all the various electronics components did. After we had the basics out of the way, he set about teaching us how to troubleshoot and repair non-working radios, TVs and other electronic gadgets.
When we students eventually tracked down the defective component we would add it to a list that our instructor would send off to our local electronics distributor. Then once a week they would send a guy over with all the parts that had been ordered the previous week.
Parts Delivery Day was a real treat because that’s when we finally had the opportunity to install the replacement parts and see if our diagnosis had been correct. And let me tell you, there are few thrills in life that can match the thrill of a teenager when he replaces a bad part in a radio or TV and have it come back to life.
Now, on to Radio Shack…
Although Radio Shack had been around for several years, I had never been inside one until I was a teenager. When we needed a part for some electronic gadget we had always simply went to our local TV repair shop. But then one day I was walking through our local mall and saw the Radio Shack store. I went inside to look around and once again, I was hooked.
They had an entire wall filled with resistors, diodes, transistors and even integrated circuits (which were relatively new at the time). For a youngster who loved tinkering with electronics, it was better than a trip to Disneyland.
For the next several years I visited that Radio Shack on a regular basis, often just to “look around” to see if they had anything new. I couldn’t even begin to guess how many electronic components I purchased there over that time.
That Radio Shack is also where I bought my very first computer. It was a TRS-80 Model 1 that came with a black and white monitor (that was basically just an RCA 12 inch black & white TV without the tuner).
That machine was far from perfect. The screen flickered and wobbled slightly after it heated up and the keyboard would put multiple characters on the screen with every key press due to something called “keybounce”. And don’t even get me started on having to wait what seemed an eternity for a large program to load from the cassette player that served as the mass storage device.
But even with all its issues, that machine was still amazing and so much fun to use. Truth be told, its numerous little quirks were a huge part of its charm. To this day that old TRS-80 is still my favorite computer ever.
As time passed, the electronics market changed right along with it. I began to notice that the crowds of shoppers I was used to seeing in Radio Shack were dwindling, eventually to the point where I would be the only non-employee in the store every time I went.
Before long that store closed for good. An era (at least for our local area) had come to an end.
For a few years after that you could still find a local Radio Shack dealer that sold a few Radio Shack components, but they were nothing like the actual Radio Shack stores. But now, even those are gone.
Sadly, as a practical matter, Radio Shack is no more.
I will always hold fond memories of my visits to Radio shack. How about you? Do you remember shopping at one of their stores? If you’re old enough to have a few gray hairs my guess is yes.
To finish up, here’s an interesting short video that goes into a bit of detail about the reason for Radio Shack’s demise. Check it out.
Pretty interesting (and a bit sad), right? By the way, if you enjoy tinkering with electronics you can still buy the same types of electronic components that Radio Shack used to sell. I get most of mine either from Amazon or DigiKey.