Fall of an empire

[tbutler]

...goodbye, Radio Shack.

I'll admit - it hasn't been the Radio Shack I remember so fondly from the 80s, not for a very long time. Some of the stories published recently, about the way employees have been treated, about stores sitting practically dead with no business, have been terribly depressing to read. The last time I was inside one, a couple of years ago to pick up a charger tip, I was unfavorably impressed, and I've been inside one... maybe four or five times in the last decade? So I can hardly say I'll miss it when the corpse stops twitching.

But I'll always miss the memories I built of them in the glory days. Long before Best Buy et al, they were one of the best places to get electronic gadgets. They were a great place to get parts, soldering gear, kit boxes, and the like. And more than anything else, they were the home of the TRS-80, the computer line I imprinted on long before I spent time using anything else. I can't count the number of hours I spent hanging around the store on the way home from junior high school, playing around with the computers. My first computer was a TRS-80 Pocket Computer I bought with the money from a paper route. I hope there will still be people who remember for some time to come, long enough to put some of the rich history into the collective memory of the 'net.