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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I suppose it would not be as fun if the title was "A thrift store of Radio Shack goodies" but the truth is I've seen an example of just about everything they are auctioning off at thrift stores. Radio Shack moved a lot of product and its out there still :-). I don't think it will hit peak nostalgia until 2020. See that way people who were 10 in 1990 and had their lives changed by the neat stuff they could buy there, will be 40 and will be trying to recapture that wonder that has been beaten out of them by 15 to 20 years of CRUD programming.

EDIT: Ok, not the pictures of the executives and the stuff they handed out for sales person of the quarter :-)

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There may also be nostalgia about the prices. If you look at the old catalogs

http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/

and adjust the prices of hifi and other toys to modern values the products seem incredibly expensive.

E.g. the best LP player + radio + speaker package from 1968 cost around $300 - which would be around $2500 today.

Of course you can spend $25,000 (or $250,000...) on modern hifi. But Radio Shack were always aimed at the mass market and not at esoteric hifi perfectionists.

RS seem to have made a lot of money hyping mediocre products that cost maybe a couple hundred dollars to manufacture and selling them for $1000 to $2500 a go.

I'd be fascinated to know what their operating margins were in the 60s and 70s.

Tandy computers, in the early days at least, had a reputation for being high quality at an affordable price. The Model I was often called the TRASH-80, but the business machines, the Color Computer line, and their line of PC compatibles were all fairly highly regarded.

The Tandy 2000, in particular, was not 100% PC compatible, but a) it came out at a time when that mattered less than it would in later years; b) it was much more performant than IBM products that would be released even a year later; c) it was cheap for PC-grade hardware. And the legacy of the Tandy 2000 lives on: the layout of three rows of four f keys above the number keys was first used on that machine's keyboard.

Owners of the TRS-80 called it the "triss-80". It was owners of other computer brands that called it the "trash-80".

My TRS-80 is still in my attic. I learned assembly language from Bill Gates - I disassembled and hand-annotated a significant portion of the ROM. I deeply regret throwing away my commented printout during a purge in my youth. :-/

Unless one is being very pedantic on their definition of "100% PC compatible", it's a common myth that Tandy computers weren't 100% compatible.

In general, Tandy PCs were compatible with the IBM PCjr[1]. In fact, Tandy sold far more PCs than IBM sold PCjrs, so later software was often advertised as being "Tandy compatible" rather than "PCjr compatible".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr

The Tandy 2000 -- their first x86 offering -- wasn't 100% PC compatible. Unlike every PC-class machine, the 2000 was based on the 80186, which precluded hardware compatibility with the PC. Software that did all I/O through the BIOS would still run, but that was thin on the ground even in the early 1980s. Most software had to be specially ported to the 2000, and the only graphical game that I could find that received this treatment was Flight Simulator.

The Tandy 1000, which came after the 2000 and used the same keyboard, was PCjr compatible, and subsequent machines would maintain IBM compatibility.

Consider that the stuff from that era was typically hand-made, point-to-point soldered or wire-wrapped. There was a lot more labor cost in the manufacturing in those days.

That said, Realistic brand "hi fi" was never that good, and overpriced for what it was.

I'd be more interested if someone discovered a trove of Heathkit stuff.

In those days I'd buy Heathkit equipment and solder it together :-)

I did that with my H-11 (a PDP-11). It worked perfectly first time, and served me well. It was the only computer of mine I got rid of, and the only one worth any money today.

> my H-11 (a PDP-11)

Oh wow, I did not know someone made a PDP-11 kit. That's interesting!

I had some experience building Heathkits, and the instructions were excellent, so I had no trouble at all with it. I later added a 6Mb hard disk drive to it, building my own I/O card and writing the boot loader for it.

6Mb was oceans of space in those days :-) Now I have an 8Tb drive.

There's a lot of rose-tinted nostalgia about Radio Shack. And they were a handy place to pick up cables and other components that weren't always easy to get elsewhere--especially when you weren't sure what you needed. That said, their stereo products were as you say mediocre at best. Pretty much overpriced crap pitched to mainstream consumers who didn't know about or were intimidated by both big stereo gear stores and specialists.

I used to work at RS (Tandy here in Europe) on Saturdays and even though the stuff was pricey the quality was horrible. I don't know any of the people running the stores back then that had RS hi-fi stuff at home in spite of being able to get it at significant discounts.

Mediocre would have been a compliment.

There are several Model 100s and 102s and even a PC-2 pocket computer. I can't say I've ever seen any of those at a thrift store.

Haha. RS customer since the early 1970s, I'm sitting on my recently refurb'ed thrift store Mach One speakers. I'm hoping you are right.

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