Radio Shack sucks

[Rich]

It's good to see that I wasn't the only prepubescent nerd.

 

[HARDWEAR]

I built (soldered) a short wave radio kit from the Shack in the mid-70's when I was like 10 years old...............and it worked!

 

[Bigsby'd]

Commodores? This is about Radio Shack. TRS80!!!!

 

[Rocco Crocco]

Commodores? This is about Radio Shack. TRS80!!!!

We had TRS80's in my grade school around 1982.
We learned BASIC.

 

[Skintaster]

I had a TRS80 3. Never did learn to do anything except play a lot of putty crappy games, and print out ASCII naked ladies on a dot matrix printer.

 

[SteveGangi]

Commodores? This is about Radio Shack. TRS80!!!!

I also had one of their "CoCo" computers, and their associated drives too. And a DX-300 short wave, and I had a Realistic car stereo and power amp in the Fiat. I stuffed two of their guitar speakers in a home made cab (it weighed a ton) and it was loud as shit.

I also used lots of their wire building ham radio antennas... quads, quagis, G5RV's, dipoles, inverted L's, etc.

 

[tazzboy]

Yeah they were once good.

 

[Groove Toad]

My first PC. A whopping 256 K of RAM, DOS 2, and a 10 meg hard drive.

 

[Bigsby'd]

We had TRS80's in my grade school around 1982.
We learned BASIC.

Same here. The technerds called them Trash-80s.

 

[Thumpalumpacus]

Commodores? This is about Radio Shack. TRS80!!!!

We had TRS80's in my grade school around 1982.
We learned BASIC.

Shit, we had Commodore PETs, complete with Chiclets keyboard:

Four K, and a built-in tape drive, damn it.

 

[Bigsby'd]

My first computer class, in elementary school, used punch-cards.

 

[TKOjams]

The only thing Rad Shack is good for is cheap crappy batteries and shitty remote control toys.
They NEVER have any of the components I'm looking for.

 

[GitFiddle]

I still have a Realistic bookshelf stereo 10W amp and separate receiver.
I got them when I was in high school back around 72. I still use them out in the garage over my workbench. Still works like a champ and sounds great with a couple of those little minimus speakers.

 

[AngryHatter]

The reason they now suck is the buying public makes no demand for the part you wanted.

I had a Trash 80 in 1979 that I bought with 16k and I then went and bought the chips to fill the memory sockets - discrete chip sockets - I had 48k of ram.

As far as the C64, I had one, it was great...now I have a nice emulator on my PC.
Load *.* baby!

 

[chasenblues]

My father hated RS i used to go with him to Lafayette Electronics they had everything back then. Including one of these which i never saw in any RS.

 

[Thunderlove]

Is there still any chance of buying output/input jacks there?

 

[parts]

C Basic..Multiplan..Wordstar..

 

[Cruznolfart]

LOL I forgot you could use a tape recorder to store data.

We are so old!!

Everything's relative; not a computor, but similar, this is what I made my retail bones on.

 

[Cozmik Cowboy]

Guitar Center is outrageous with their pricing on that type of stuff. I do have 2 small music shops nearby I'll check out tomorrow before I order online.

If you have 2 small shops nearby, why are you going to GC?!?!?! Support your local shops; GC is evil.

I recollect when you could go to RS & they'd actually have the parts to build a radio - and geeks on staff who could tell you how! Now they're "Cell Plan Shack". Went in last year to get some DeOxit; not only did they not have it, the phone seller hadn't heard of it & didn't understand when I explained what it was for.

My dad was a college prof; when I was in HS I got a job on campus working in the computer. That's right, kids, in the computer. Went around 3 1/2 walls of a ~30'X30' room, with several islands protruding a bit more than 15', all of it about 5' high; lots of tubes & reels of tape. I entered grades at a mechanical keyboard that punched holes in cards the same size as a Scantron card (and none of my chads hung!)

 

[Caleb]

I'm amazed that they're still in business.