Ditto palandri's comment. Back in the 1980's, I was a driver/rep and for lunch I'd stop by and play with the TRS-80. Never could afford to buy one. I went from Commodore64 to an NEC dual-floppy laptop from DAK Industries. After that, I had various custom-built towers. About a decade or more ago I bought a mini-tower and laptop combo-offer from Best Buy. Junked those a while back and now just use an HP Envy laptop that I bought from Costco online.
Back in the day, I use to go to Radio Shack and buy these kits you would solder together to learn about resistors, transistors, capacitors, and make things like a crystal radio, shortwave radio, AM/FM radio, AM transmitter.. After that I moved on to something called Heath kits, which were bigger projects of the same sort of thing.
I played with Lincoln Logs. Does that count? LOL I even built a sort of typewriter out of them. It didn't actually do anything, just somewhat resembled a typewriter.
I used to go around our neighborhood picking peoples trash for old radios and TV sets, and unsolder resistors, capacitors, vacuum tubes and so on. Then using magazines like Popular Electronics, wire up some home brew devices...long before the days of Radio Shacks. Back in my day, we had local radio shops that sold such components. And yeah, then I progressed to some HeathKit radios...in fact their whole brew of Ham radio devices...transceivers, 1 KW amps, electronic keyers, radio to phone connections, and lots and lots of antennas. Plus a little QRP low wattage battery operated unit. By the time Radio Shack hit the market, I had moved on to college I guess, so I never really used them for that sort of thing. HealthKit was by far the best, and learning circuits from the electronic magazines and studying for my Advanced Class Ham license. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro
Wow. Looks like vintage products from years ago. And how truly stated: Heathkits could teach deeper lessons. "The kits taught Steve Jobs that products were manifestations of human ingenuity, not magical objects dropped from the sky," writes a business author, who goes on to quote Jobs as saying "It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment."[7] Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
I really love radio shack. Even though they are not popular here in our country. It is the place where you can buy those techy things. Radio shack provides us with things that we are very interested in the field of technology. From the basic one to the more complicated.
Radio Shack is auctioning off the contents of their 'museum'. Some interesting and odd items in there - electronics, TRS-80 items, racing bikes, artwork, signed posters, etc. https://ubidestates.hibid.com/catalog/103245/radioshack-auction--1/?#auction-header-content
