Many fond memories of Radio Shack. I bought some electronics kits, a mini DJ setup, and many, many components there as a kid. At one time, they had quite a catalog of Radio Shack branded items that were "good but not great"... but more importantly available a few miles away within practically any city. Almost every mall in St. Louis had one (usually near a hobby train store or an arcade).
> ...but more importantly available a few miles away within practically any city.
We're around the same age and likely have similar memories. I poured over Radio Shack catalogs and weekly ads when I was a kid. When my family went to the local mall I'd make a beeline for the Radio Shack and play w/ the various computers there until my parents pried me away.
When I started doing PC tech work (in rural Western Ohio in the late 90s) it was always an option, no matter how far out in "the sticks" you were working, to drive to a Radio Shack for emergency parts. They might not have exactly what you needed, and you'd probably pay a hefty price, but you could get the job done.
That ubiquity definitely left an impression on IT technicians of my generation. I was recently doing some work w/ a legacy system that called for some serial gender-bender/null modem cables. Not having any handy I had to improvise with some DE-9 to RJ-45 hoods and creative crimping to get what I needed. A cow-orker commented "We used to be able to just go to Radio Shack when we needed stuff like that in a hurry."
Absolutely! There would inevitably be a CoCo on display and that's the machine I'd play with.
A common BASIC program I'd write on new-to-me computers was a FOR/NEXT loop to print all the characters in the character set. I remember discovering the color semigraphics characters in the CoCo character set and being weirded-out. I'd never seen anything like that on any of the other machines I'd ever used.
I snared a CoCo2 a few years ago so I could re-live a few of those memories (and explore the machine with actual documentation).
My favorite part of that era was subscribing to Rainbow magazine. Every month when it arrived, reading it cover to cover a few times. I didn't have access to any dialup in those days, so this was my only window to the whole ecosystem. I remember a box of 5.25 inch floppies were horrendously expensive at Radio Shack, maybe it was just our store though, I grew up in a small town in Canada.
Ah, the nostalgia. Those early days of home computers were sure some amazing times. Possibilities were infinite. Who'da thunk that we'd carry freakin' supercomputers (compared to those early machines) around in our pockets someday? Not me. LOL!
They were always expensive, but you could go there on a Saturday afternoon and get something that will work - it might not be the right part, but it could be made to work. And expensive is relative - a $0.05 resister for $0.75 is very overpriced, and yet cheap. If you want to be in a hobby having that access close makes it a lot easier.
What's the cost of shipping on a single resistor from mouser or digi-key? Can you buy <15 from Amazon? Another way to think of it is that the ability to have no minimum quantity, not having to wait for shipping and maybe, if you're lucky, someone who can help you with info if you need it is baked into the price. With that in mind, maybe it isn't as overpriced as it seems.
Amazon didn't exist at that time (or was probably still only selling books). Digi-Key still had a $25 minimum order. RS was pretty much the only game in town if you were a high schooler with a small allowance.
OTOH, some items were surprisingly cheap. A couple years after college, I had a small business running out of a spare bedroom making temperature monitors and there was a shielded audio cable with connector that I used for the sensor. Radio Shack's price was about $1.50 each but all the "real" parts houses were at least 5x that.
I don't buy a single anything from those others. I'm going to buy enough to meet their $40 minimum order. Shipping isn't free, and takes 4-6 weeks (remember this is 1960-1990). All this means that I'm planning all my projects months ahead to make a large order that will keep me busy several months (starting 2 months from now)
As an engineer my boss will approve $80 for a single resister after overnight shipping if that is what I need. The factory is buying the resisters a reel at a time (or similar large quantities)
We spent hours at the local one. Picked up lots of parts and gear when I suppose they would have rather us bought their relabeled Realistic stuff. In junior high helped the 5th grade teacher with his network of CoCo 2s that used a CoCo 3 as a "file server" via a rotary dial to download courseware through the cassette interface. I wrote a fraction math trainer in BASIC for him to use with the students. He was still using it when I was in high school.
> Since Tandy was a private company, his death would have forced a liquidation of the company in order to pay the inheritance taxes.
So much value is destroyed by this form of taxation. It's inherent in having to liquidate much wealth in a short period of time. There should be a way to match the time scales better, as opposed to forcing a company to go public. Like putting non-voting shares into escrow and allowing them to be sold over years or decades.
This would come with the loss of taxes as businesses go under, but at least some offsetting increase from successful businesses that are allowed to continue operating.
There are so many mature and overly effective modern means to preserve wealth. Modern trusts, LLCs, corporations ad nauseum. It is embarrassing to make such a claim "(s)o much value is destroyed by this form of taxation" in 2026; So much concentrated and localized value was potentially diverted back then under such specialized and naive conditions, which is far from common now. And to the point, it merely could have happened and actually did not.
Exactly. It's hard to read a sob story about some private company getting liquidated to pay taxes when the far more common abuse of inheritance tax laws is the asset step up basis on death. We should narrow down considerably the amount of assets eligible for that treatment. As it is we just perpetuate ever increasing family dynasties having no relationship to merit.
I worry about dismantling working, productive smaller businesses (and they employment they provide) in service of preventing wealth concentration. In the US, at least, Big Wealth is really unaffected by estate taxes. Smaller businesses with less sophisticated ownership structure end up with a tax burden or being forced to liquidate.
I admittedly know very little about running a large "small" business, but my impression after decades of scare tactics (which happen to sound a lot like this comment), is that the threats (if they were legitimate to begin with) were actually some well-known, well-understood problem that no one actually wants to fix, like healthcare costs, or that some small businesses are simply very poorly run and their struggles were entirely predictable.
I would posit that there is likely far more value killed through inheritance of these businesses than through forced sale due to inheritance tax. I can certainly personally point to many local businesses that were inherited and run extremely poorly by the heirs due to a lack of drive. These heirs are mostly milking the value built by the prior generation until it runs dry. A forced sale due to an inheritance tax would have put these businesses into the hands of individuals who had the drive and the financial motivation to build the business rather than milk it dry. I suspect - though certainly can't validate - this is the far more common outcome than the hypothetical value destruction you suggest would come from the forced sale.
Does this even happen with that much regularity? The company would have to be valued at over $15 million to trigger federal estate taxes. I feel like if you have that big of a going concern and never got together with a lawyer to figure out inheritance, that's a bit on you.
In the US, federal estate taxes aren't a thing if you pay a few thousand to an estate lawyer to setup irrevocable trusts and whatnot. And these tactics usually work for state estate taxes too.
Plus the federal estate tax only starts at $15M for an individual and $30M for a married couple, so it has no effect on what most would consider a "small" business.
Most people on this forum would be served well (or at least their heirs) by spending a few thousand on an estate lawyer to prevent their heirs from having to waste time in probate court.
I agree that there are legal strategies to avoid estate tax. I also strenuously agree that avoiding probate with estate planing should be in the plan for anybody who has any assets.
My concern with estate taxes is, like I sid, the potential destruction of functioning businesses-- just what was discussed in the article.
I know the tax code has provisions to permit an extension of up to fourteen years for payment. There's a non-tax-deductible interest expense, though. A business with low margins might not be able to absorb that expense even over a 14 year time window.
In the end I'm probably thinking too theoretically. Perhaps there are no real businesses large enough to exceed the estate tax exemption that haven't otherwise planned for succession. I may just be getting "the feels" about theoretical jobs being destroyed in service of taxation.
re: small business
In my mind, at least, a business w/ a $30 million capitalization is a small business. Where I am (rural Ohio) a decently-sized family farming operation could hit that $30M cap (with land prices being what they are now). That's between 1,500 and 2,000 acres of farmland at market price. That doesn't take into account potentially inflated valuations as a result of datacenter speculators. In my county we've seen a Meta datacenter project pay 10x market value for farmland (resulting in skewed property tax valuations across the entire county).
I miss having a local place where I can buy a discrete transistor or capacitor.
But Radio Shack was also a pioneer in intrusive information gathering. They would always ask for your name and address at check-out, often practically insisting they couldn't complete the sale without it. I usually gave them "1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington DC" as my address. I hope Clinton and GWB liked those catalogs!
I think their cash registers ran SCO Xenix. I ran the free version on my desktop at work for a few months in the late 90s (I think that I still have the installation media).
They had the same virtual console behavior as we see in Linux.
I had a friend who worked in one of the stores, and I scared the daylights out of him by hitting Ctrl-Alt-F4 on his cash register to get a login. After switching back to F1, he learned the scary trick himself. I have no idea why all of the gettys were enabled in /etc/inittab.
Edit: I had no idea about Pier 1 (rest in peace), the 1959 proxy battle for the family takeover, Tandy's sale of Pier 1 in 1966, Tandy's purchase of a controlling interest in the failing Radio Shack for $300k, Tandy's abrasive management style, or his early demise at 60 from a heart attack.
Peir 1 folded just as we entered the COVID pandemic.
Tandy had a Xenix license from Microsoft and shipped a version on their TRS-80 Model 16 and Tandy 6000 machines (both of which were Motorola 68000-based). It would be interesting to know how much of their own stuff they used internally. I have a recollection of a (potentially apocryphal) story the TRS-80 Model 1 had a "fallback" use as an in-store management computer if they failed to sell.
Free OpenServer appeared in 1996. The cash registers were running on the x86 platform, for sure (68000 was a dead architecture for general purpose computing by then - Apple had been on POWER for several years).
I'm talking more like the late 80s when I was giving my address info to clerks at Rat Shack who were typing it into some kind of green-screen app on what, if memory serves, kinda looked like a Wyse terminal.
> insisting they couldn't complete the sale without it
I worked there in the 80s. Early 80s was paper. Late 80s was terminal. Typing an R in the first name field bypassed this obligation IIRC.
Reason RS was so insistent is the company originally started via mail order and wanted this revenue stream to not dwindle....although it obviously did by the 80s.
PS: There's a business who still has their Tandy Leather sign out front in my city.
Huh, they asked for phone number here in SoCal. I may have given it the first time but afterward always said no or no thanks. Don’t remember them insisting but if they did I’d probably have given Jenny’s number.
I recall getting asked for my mail address at a UK retail electronics store some time in the 2010 to 2015 time period. They wouldn't complete the transaction without it. I walked out and bought it from Amazon UK instead. I figured if I was giving my mail address away I might as well get the benefit of the cheaper sticker price.
I've not been very sympathetic to the demise of bricks & mortar retail since then.
i learned how to write BASIC on a Tandy Color Computer 3 but that is not what I am most proud about. I was officially (statistically) the worst salesperson at Radio Shack in northern Ohio one summer in college. I looked like a dynamo of productivity, but in actuality I was mostly spending time talking to a Ham radio operator about diodes or a musician customer about King Crimson and Can. Take your name and address. Pffft, I would often make something up so nobody noticed. I sold a computer to a woman for her daughter going to college and felt dirty but there was no other way she was getting a computer. I hope she went on to become an astronaut, or principled House member
i just learned there are about 100 Tandy Leather stores out there if you want to pay tribute
I wish the stores were still around. As a kid, I loved going through the bins of electronic components, trying to figure out how they'd all work together in a circuit. As an adult who just got his Ham Radio Technician license, I'd love to be able to drop by and grab a few parts instead of ordering online. Ham Radio Outlet is great, but they are few and far between.
> As a kid, I loved going through the bins of electronic components, trying to figure out how they'd all work together in a circuit.
They sold a "1000-in-one" electronics kit that came with a book that would teach you all that you needed to know to get started with a lifelong addiction to electronics parts. My grandpa gave me one as a birthday gift one year, and thus began my early addiction to Radio Shack. ;)
I had a couple of those, usually for Christmas, including one with hex keys and 4-bit CPU that you could program. Much better than the "snap circuits" that the kids have these days.
That was for radio & hifi kit, but they had a bunch of others.
I remember Enercell for batteries, Supertape for cassette tapes, Genexa TVs and VCRs, Archer TV/radio aerials and distribution systems, Micronta meters, and, of course, the Science Fair 200-in-1 electronic project kits.
The branch opposite my school had several "characters" amongst the staff who would amuse themselves by pelting you with dud resistors if you refused their entreaties to sign up to the Battery Club. A great place for nerdy teenagers to visit, but I can't imagine them actually ever having sold very much...
I envied you young kids from my Model I with Level II Basic ROM w/ expansion bay and 4 floppy drives running LDOS. The chip upgrade to display lower case letters was a godsend.
I still have my Color Computer I in a box somewhere in the garage, with the original large cassette tape player I used to read and write cassette tapes with. I've probably forgotten exactly what volume I had to keep it at to get it to read the tapes. As a dumb kid, I managed to get the keyboard swapped out (hated the chiclet one it came with), and I think I found someone who swapped out the 16K it came with for (iirc) 128K. I should really see if it boots. Or even turns on.
And never mentioned Jonathan T. Frye, who wrote a column iun the Radio Shack flyers about what was going on in the business. Like opening their own recording tape company. Or opening 1,000 stores in the USA. Or the milestone when they had 2,000 stores in the usa.
I knew one of on the Tandys. He was a super interesting fellow and you never would have known he came from a wealthy background. He sold 5 gallon water jugs out of a white van in St. Thomas.
Jessica Tandy, a supporting actress in the 1987 film "Batteries not Included", was also an early and avid member of Radio Shack's Battery of the month club up until her passing in 1994.
We're around the same age and likely have similar memories. I poured over Radio Shack catalogs and weekly ads when I was a kid. When my family went to the local mall I'd make a beeline for the Radio Shack and play w/ the various computers there until my parents pried me away.
When I started doing PC tech work (in rural Western Ohio in the late 90s) it was always an option, no matter how far out in "the sticks" you were working, to drive to a Radio Shack for emergency parts. They might not have exactly what you needed, and you'd probably pay a hefty price, but you could get the job done.
That ubiquity definitely left an impression on IT technicians of my generation. I was recently doing some work w/ a legacy system that called for some serial gender-bender/null modem cables. Not having any handy I had to improvise with some DE-9 to RJ-45 hoods and creative crimping to get what I needed. A cow-orker commented "We used to be able to just go to Radio Shack when we needed stuff like that in a hurry."
Few things impress me more than someone using shell sizes correctly :-)
I considered saying "8P8C" for the jack, as well. >smile<
Sounds like my childhood. Remember the Tandy TRS-80 CoCo? I do. :)
A common BASIC program I'd write on new-to-me computers was a FOR/NEXT loop to print all the characters in the character set. I remember discovering the color semigraphics characters in the CoCo character set and being weirded-out. I'd never seen anything like that on any of the other machines I'd ever used.
I snared a CoCo2 a few years ago so I could re-live a few of those memories (and explore the machine with actual documentation).
There are several other good sources out there too but it's a good start for anyone looking to relive the fun old days.
Radioshack catalog archive in case anybody missed it:
https://radioshackcatalogs.com/index.htm
OTOH, some items were surprisingly cheap. A couple years after college, I had a small business running out of a spare bedroom making temperature monitors and there was a shielded audio cable with connector that I used for the sensor. Radio Shack's price was about $1.50 each but all the "real" parts houses were at least 5x that.
As an engineer my boss will approve $80 for a single resister after overnight shipping if that is what I need. The factory is buying the resisters a reel at a time (or similar large quantities)
Are you serious? That's fkn brilliant!
https://www.starborneworks.com/?p=22
So much value is destroyed by this form of taxation. It's inherent in having to liquidate much wealth in a short period of time. There should be a way to match the time scales better, as opposed to forcing a company to go public. Like putting non-voting shares into escrow and allowing them to be sold over years or decades.
This would come with the loss of taxes as businesses go under, but at least some offsetting increase from successful businesses that are allowed to continue operating.
Plus the federal estate tax only starts at $15M for an individual and $30M for a married couple, so it has no effect on what most would consider a "small" business.
Most people on this forum would be served well (or at least their heirs) by spending a few thousand on an estate lawyer to prevent their heirs from having to waste time in probate court.
My concern with estate taxes is, like I sid, the potential destruction of functioning businesses-- just what was discussed in the article.
I know the tax code has provisions to permit an extension of up to fourteen years for payment. There's a non-tax-deductible interest expense, though. A business with low margins might not be able to absorb that expense even over a 14 year time window.
In the end I'm probably thinking too theoretically. Perhaps there are no real businesses large enough to exceed the estate tax exemption that haven't otherwise planned for succession. I may just be getting "the feels" about theoretical jobs being destroyed in service of taxation.
re: small business
In my mind, at least, a business w/ a $30 million capitalization is a small business. Where I am (rural Ohio) a decently-sized family farming operation could hit that $30M cap (with land prices being what they are now). That's between 1,500 and 2,000 acres of farmland at market price. That doesn't take into account potentially inflated valuations as a result of datacenter speculators. In my county we've seen a Meta datacenter project pay 10x market value for farmland (resulting in skewed property tax valuations across the entire county).
But Radio Shack was also a pioneer in intrusive information gathering. They would always ask for your name and address at check-out, often practically insisting they couldn't complete the sale without it. I usually gave them "1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington DC" as my address. I hope Clinton and GWB liked those catalogs!
They had the same virtual console behavior as we see in Linux.
I had a friend who worked in one of the stores, and I scared the daylights out of him by hitting Ctrl-Alt-F4 on his cash register to get a login. After switching back to F1, he learned the scary trick himself. I have no idea why all of the gettys were enabled in /etc/inittab.
Edit: I had no idea about Pier 1 (rest in peace), the 1959 proxy battle for the family takeover, Tandy's sale of Pier 1 in 1966, Tandy's purchase of a controlling interest in the failing Radio Shack for $300k, Tandy's abrasive management style, or his early demise at 60 from a heart attack.
Peir 1 folded just as we entered the COVID pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pier_1_Imports
Tandy had a Xenix license from Microsoft and shipped a version on their TRS-80 Model 16 and Tandy 6000 machines (both of which were Motorola 68000-based). It would be interesting to know how much of their own stuff they used internally. I have a recollection of a (potentially apocryphal) story the TRS-80 Model 1 had a "fallback" use as an in-store management computer if they failed to sell.
https://www.eetimes.com/sco-provides-free-unix-system-licens...
From memory, the two serial ports could run classic getty processes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_II#model16
Here's hoping for the power of Hacker News.
I worked there in the 80s. Early 80s was paper. Late 80s was terminal. Typing an R in the first name field bypassed this obligation IIRC.
Reason RS was so insistent is the company originally started via mail order and wanted this revenue stream to not dwindle....although it obviously did by the 80s.
PS: There's a business who still has their Tandy Leather sign out front in my city.
I've not been very sympathetic to the demise of bricks & mortar retail since then.
i just learned there are about 100 Tandy Leather stores out there if you want to pay tribute
They sold a "1000-in-one" electronics kit that came with a book that would teach you all that you needed to know to get started with a lifelong addiction to electronics parts. My grandpa gave me one as a birthday gift one year, and thus began my early addiction to Radio Shack. ;)
I remember Enercell for batteries, Supertape for cassette tapes, Genexa TVs and VCRs, Archer TV/radio aerials and distribution systems, Micronta meters, and, of course, the Science Fair 200-in-1 electronic project kits.
The branch opposite my school had several "characters" amongst the staff who would amuse themselves by pelting you with dud resistors if you refused their entreaties to sign up to the Battery Club. A great place for nerdy teenagers to visit, but I can't imagine them actually ever having sold very much...
Fascinating guy!
HN rules.