trs-80

Last week RadioShack announced it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. While this doesn’t mean the chain is going to immediately vanish, and companies HAVE recovered from bankruptcy before, the odds of RadioShack pulling off a save would be nothing short of a miracle. It’s most likely we’ll see the slow sink into quicksand that eventually swallowed Blockbuster. For the longest time, RadioShack was the one place that came to mind if you needed to repair an electronic gizmo and needed a specific part, or you had to find an obscure battery size, or you were ten years old and wanted a build-your-own-radio kit. What we’ve seen from them over the last 20 years is typical of a large business that gets left in the dust: a slow reaction time to consumer trends, a decline in customer service, and the rise of superior competition. Just for fun, let’s look back at some of the geeky products you could get from RadioShack in its prime. THE TRS-80 Radio Shack had its