Radio Shack was never a “cool” company. I mean, did anyone ever get all excited and say, “Hey! I’m going to Radio Shack”? Probably not. Even those of us who adopted the TRS-80 as our first computer way, way back when had our issues with The Shack.
I liked my TRS-80 Model III as a computer. I didn’t like how ugly it was; that gunboat grey design was pure Radio Shack. And as the computer industry began to show boundless energy, the rulers of Tandy in Fort Worth, Texas demonstrated how uncomfortable they were with innovation and how reluctant they were to adopt to the new world.
The publisher I worked for back in the mid-1980s collaborated quite a bit with Tandy on books and documentation. Although I wasn’t involved with the conversations, I heard of them. Radio Shack was about sales, basic merchandising. Tandy bought boatloads of electronic crap overseas, shipped it here, and sold it at high markup. They didn’t care about the crap. Computers were a burden to them because the devices required support: When someone buys a remote control car at Radio Shack, they leave the store (with batteries) and Tandy prays that they never return. Not so with computers.
The whole TRS-80 thing was a fluke anyway: Tandy built one computer for each store, using surplus black-and-white TVs for the monitor. The initial batch sold out. Demand was high. Tandy responded. They unwittingly began an industry, but their focus was really on sales.
I remember working with a frustrated Radio Shack engineer. He was developing their first 1200 BPS modem, programming the UART all by himself. It was a crazy time in the computer industry and his talents would have been appreciated anywhere else, but not at Tandy.
So it’s with no tear in my eye that I see Radio Shack closing 1,000 of their stores. They earned a dubious spot in the history of the personal computer by coming out within months of the Apple I. Even so, they offered no charm, no enthusiasm, and definitely no appreciation for what they did. Quite bluntly, they should have never sold anything other than leather.
