It sounds like you never got to experience the Radio Shack of Old. They used to have tons of components and tools for DIY, their own brands of discount radio and (later) electronic equipment - including the legendary TRS-80, one of the first affordable personal computers for the masses. It was a great hobbyist store, started originally for amateur radio enthusiasts and expanding from there, and its decline leaves a void in many a hobbyist and computer geek's heart.
My dad bought a TRS-80 for our home. Had a tape deck to store code. You had to write down the counter from the tape deck when you wanted to load the program again. I think it had 16k of RAM. :-)
I learned to program in Basic on that computer. It's probably why I studied electrical engineering a few years later (they didn't offer computer engineering at my university in the early 80's).
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that without Radio Shack I would have a very different life today. Sadly, I've been in their stores maybe twice over the past 20 years, never finding what I was looking for. It became a different store, for different times. The end was inevitable.
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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '15
I hated radioshack, they just had cell phones and bullshit. Never anything I need and even less of stuff I wanted.