Via Yahoo! News, “RadioShack to close up to 700 stores”
Harsh news. I wonder if the Radio Shack in the Capital Mall will be one of the stores to go? Large national chains closing … this is economic recovery?
There was a time when my personal test of whether a town was a city was whether it had a Radio Shack. I remember the old Radio Shack that was in a building east of the Ralph’s on the east side of Olympia. I remember going in there, but I honestly cannot recall what I was looking to buy.
Radio Shack was the vendor of my first computer, a Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer. A seemingly sleek silver case with 4k of memory and Microsoft Basic in ROM, back before Microsoft purchased DR-DOS.
Radio Shack always seemed a bit too thick with schlock. I seem to recall that my Color Computer had this odd behaviour where the screen would go all fuzzy and lose vertical sync. If I pressed down on the top of the plastic case, I could fix it for a short spell. Radio Shack couldn’t fix it, but I don’t remember ever getting very good service.
I’m having such a strong memory of lusting after the impossibly large storage of an 8-inch floppy drive … 1.2 megs! I could hardly imagine … such a vast expanse of storage!