As everyone reading this is surely aware, Radio Shack has very recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and is in the process of closing 1784 of their stores. And there can be no doubt that everyone reading this saw the writing on the wall years ago. And that’s where I will leave the matter of their decline, as the purpose of this post is not to malign the once mighty, fallen. The purpose of this post is to share my memories of the Radio Shack that once was. Here we go.

The first memory I have, connected with Radio Shack, is the crystal radio kit my father gave me when I was about seven years old. (A crystal radio is a passive receiver that requires no external power source. I recall finding that pretty amazing.) The next memory I have is of the first time I recall being inside a Radio Shack store. I was with my mom and dad in a shopping mall in Harrisonburg, VA, wanting some toy from a toy store there. My dad told me to come with him, as there was something I’d probably like better than the toy. He took me to a Radio Shack a few stores down the way and bought me a portable AM transistor radio (this model but black, not red). He was right about the toy, by the way.

I grew up along the York River in York County, VA and, living on the water in that region, hurricanes were something we had to watch out for. I recall getting front-line weather news way back when via our Realistic Weatheradio, perched atop the kitchen fridge. (It was a hurricane that, ultimately, destroyed the house I grew up in.)

Dad was a NASA engineer and, unsurprisingly, enjoyed poking around the local Radio Shacks (in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia) with some frequency. I was often there with him or in a store on my own while my mother shopped down at the mall. The things I was most interested in, of course, were the computers.

I started taking an interest in the computer displays around 1981, as I recall. I would spend a lot of time on the TRS-80 Color Computer, playing whatever cartridges were laying out. I used to love playing the CoCo version of Mega-Bug with its nifty little magnifying glass effect — it was always a treat to find that running in the store. (Weak joysticks, though.) The more business-oriented machines were intriguing to me, as well. The TRS-80 Model II with its 8-inch floppy drives looked, to me, like an intimidatingly powerful computer. The Model III had my attention, also. I would sit down in front of those all-in-one systems and type things into their TRS-DOS command lines…but I didn’t know any of the commands.

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