The End of Radio Shack?
http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstec......xml.html

I don't think anything I bought from Radio Shack in the last 25 years ever lasted more than three months. Can't say I'm sad to see it go.
Nostalgic for the old days when it was a real hobbyist store.

I wonder with their very high prices they lasted this long.

It's been years and years since I bought anything from them.
It's too bad - it used to be fun to go in there and poke around, and they had a nice selection of remote controlled cars, audio equipment that I enjoyed using, and things of that nature.

I think I bought some speaker wire from them not too long ago that's still working!

Yes to what he said. Used to love to go and poke around years ago. Many years ago.

My first computer was a TRS 80. I think I still have it boxed up in the garage. I can't remember if I purchased it at a local Radio Shack or mail order.

I bought it after starting college and played Crowther and Woods Original Adventure on it hooked up through my phone and an acoustic modem to the schools computer. I learned assembly language on it and did my senior project on it where I designed a text to speech translator on it interfacing a phoneme based sound chip to it. Good memories.

My first was a TRS-80, too!

Mine was the model 16 and I added a hard drive to it. I think it was 100 MB and cost me $300. (It may have only been 30 MB, I'm not really sure!) I also modded the keyboard to get lower case and built a wood case to house it all. I remember playing the original flight simulator on it, which was truly archaic with those big blocky pixels! LOL Pretty amazing that they could actually get a crude flight simulator running on it!

I remember Eliza, the artificial intelligence program that knew three sentences. Lol

How did you feel remembering Eliza?

Not just Radio Shack, but hundreds of JC Penny and Macy stores are closing their doors which is going to put out thousands of people out of work. Also- Office Depot not making it and is being bought by Staples. Shame... The economy is pretty bad now. Wonder how the government will factor these workers into their laughable 5.6% unemployment rate.

Now that you can buy a completely assembled Cell Phone at the grocery store, people don't need to buy the parts to build their own Bar Harbor lunch boxes.

Sad. I am not a fan of chains but still, I sort of miss Woolworth and Made in the USA stuff.

Does that mean I can skip the last four payments on my TRS-80 Model II?

"Yet Model II won't... become obsolete."

It looks like it comes with a paper storage cabinet and a microwave oven,

LOL. Those are 3 additional 12" floppy drives. The filing cabinet is probably for storage of the actual floppy's!

You'll need all 4 floppy drives to store that 10,000 item inventory!

My first equalizer for my stereo was a Realistic from Radio Shack.

Original Microsoft Flight Simulator