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Post by Ginnie on Apr 20, 2010 20:09:51 GMT -4
What could be better? This guy scanned in every Radio Shack catalog from 1939-2005. I remember when they were delivered in my mailbox - they got your name and address when you bought something there. I used to pour over and over through the pages looking at all the interesting stuff they had. Anybody else enjoy this? www.radioshackcatalogs.com/index.html
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Post by Ginnie on Apr 20, 2010 20:23:06 GMT -4
Hey, I still have this - "the low cost stereo microphone line mixer @ 24.95" ! Anyone else can find something they bought in one of the catalogs?
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Post by Apollo Gnomon on Apr 21, 2010 0:28:49 GMT -4
I still have the mic mixer in the smooth-cornered 90's case, and I just tore apart a broken 4 channel (top left, I bought mine at a pawn shop) to salvage the meters and sliders.
If I looked deep enough in the right box, I might even find a "battery club" card. Remember those? You could go in once a month and get a free battery. One. Cheap. Battery. Free.
Yep, back in the days when Radio Shack still sold radios. Now they're just a cell-phone store with a dusty rack of resistors in the back corner.
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Post by Kiwi on Apr 21, 2010 4:58:46 GMT -4
Back in my younger days there wasn't much in the way of electronics chain stores in New Zealand until Dick Smith from Australia opened up here, in the mid- to late-70s I think. Before that the shops were usually on back streets in old buildings with bare-wood shelving and all the small bits were in row upon row of long, narrow, open-top, brown cardboard boxes.
But the thing I remember most was the guy who staffed nearly every electronics shop -- the old-time version of the modern-day nerd. He usually had a full beard and wore glasses and a red jersey.
And he knew EVERYTHING about electronics.
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Post by Obviousman on Apr 21, 2010 5:28:57 GMT -4
My first computer (that I owned; I don't count the PDP-11/70 I learnt on):
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Post by echnaton on Apr 21, 2010 10:12:46 GMT -4
I used to lover reading those catalogs. Particularly Lewis Kornfeld Flyerside Chat articles. I loved some Radio Shack products and avoided others because of their poor quality. In the eighties, I was part of a start up company that wound up being a manufacturer of oddball peripherals for Radio Shack computers. We also became a supplier to Tandy. We mostly made serial to parallel converters. The Color Computer only had a serial port and it was cheaper to by our converter and a parallel printer than a serial printer. Later we put a switch in the converter that allowed connection to a printer or passed through the serial port. That was a big hit. Our gross margin was about 50%. Something not too many products have these days. We sold thousands of a later model directly to Tandy so they could locate their parallel printers away from the computer based registers in the pre-USB days. Those were the golden days of computing.
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