John Roach has died
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
RIP John Roach, marketing visionary.
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.
That was likely my last electronics purchase from Amazon.
There is now no longer a single store in that same town that sells discrete components; the only way to source them is online.
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.
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.
This was common in any store in that time period. I worked in a popular shop in England in 1981 and the cash register did not calculate change IIRC.
This is still common in small shops. Not sure why the NY Times thinks basic arithmetic is hard.
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.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80
This bit from [1] is hilarious by the way:
> 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.
Presumably Mr. Roach only made <= $32K.
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.
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.
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.
There is definitely something appealing about the simplicity of 8-bit computing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPYmpf64OfA
Secret money-saving strategy that makes store people love you: "got any old demo units I can buy?"
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.
seems like a millenial wrote the obit :) everybody used to do this
I still do.
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.
I felt busted the first time I saw this.