One of my favorite bits of tech trivia is the story of Tandy's pivot from being a leathergoods store to selling some of the first home "microcomputers" simply because microcomputing overlapped as a hobbyist activity in it's early days.
Quite unexpectedly, Tandy/Radioshack's computer business has gone kaput, but Tandy leathergoods still exists and has operating stores more than 100 years later.
Eerie coincidence: Coleco, manufacturers of the ill-fated ADAM home computer, which competed with Tandy/Radio Shack, was originally the Connecticut Leather Company.
Started picking up "retro computers" in the early 90's when they could be had for $25 or so. I was disappointed to see all the bodge wires on the TRS-80 motherboard. Compared to the Apple II, Commodore 64, it looked kind of ... half-baked when it shipped.
I did leather working as a kid in the 80s and only knew Tandy as the leather company. I’ve been a programmer for decades now and had heard of the Tandy computers but never connected the name to the leather company. I’d especially never heard that they also owned Radio Shack. This article was a real eye opener.
> The project was formally approved on the 2nd of February in 1977 and the production run was increased to 3500. You’d think that moving from 1000 to 3500 computers was evidence of growing support for the project, but no. This 3500 number was so that when the computer failed to sell, Tandy Corporation could use them in their Radio Shack stores for inventory control — stores which numbered 3400 at the time.
This part is kind of amazing. They recognized the potential of computing, and wanted to have it for their use, but didn't think anybody else would want to do inventory management?
It sounds to me like they intended to attempt to sell the machines, but wanted to make sure that if those machines failed to sell, they wouldn't have wasted money on a bunch of hardware that was useless to them.
Really good projects fail for all sorts of really stupid reasons. It shouldn't be considered amazing to reduce the risk of a new and unproven product with a backup plan that makes use of nearly 100% of the unsold inventory. ;)
I would have assumed you would want at least one per store simply to be able to show the thing and help sales. That you could also use it for inventory feels like someone within the company trying to prop up the rationale for ordering such a (seemingly) large number of units.
There were two places my Mum used to know to look for me, after school, if I wasn't home at an appropriate time: the TANDY shop, and the COMPUTER AGE shop.
These two shops - the former a means of access to the TRS-80, the latter a means of access to the Apple II and Atari 800 computers - were my "second class-room", inasmuch as I learned so much in the few hours I got away with hacking there.
The TANDY salesmen were more than willing to let us kids play with their systems, but we were never allowed to use the disc drives (now I know why, finally) - whereas the COMPUTER AGE salesmen, once they noticed me furiously typing away every day after school, gave me a floppy disc to save things. This floppy disc was a constant accessory and a major source of hassle with my regular school teachers, who didn't have a clue what it was and were mostly just miffed with my obsession over it. "What is that thing and why do you carry it everywhere you go?", once teacher asked me during a break, to which my precocious answer was "its the future, lady!", earning me a visit to the headmaster for disrepect (catholic school...)
The TANDY I'd go to was in the middle of a shopping district in one of the wealthiest parts of town (Subiaco, Perth, Australia), and the COMPUTER AGE was located in the midst of all of the wealthy schools of the city (Claremont), which meant I was constantly battling with rich kids to gain access to the machines .. eventually I witnessed a wave of rich kids disappearing from the shops as they got their systems unpacked at home, but I could never afford it, so was a regular with the salesmen. One of the COMPUTER AGE guys noticed this one day, and it formed the basis of a long friendship.
I'll always remember those halcyon days, when things were really very adventurous. I'm pretty glad I never got to save much on the TRS-80's, as it gave me more motivation to study "The Apple Way", and that eventually led me to gaining access to modems and BBS's and things, which were always more fun on Apple than the TRS-80.
So its pretty nice to hear the backstory of Tandy, ultimately, as a shoelace vendor that became a digital pioneer.
OT, but the start in leather goods reminds me of how Nintendo started way back in the 19th century making playing cards, like hanafuda [0]. It wasn't until the late 1960s / early 70s that they got into electronics, and as they say, the rest was history.
One thing I always found weird about Radio Shack was that, even though ham radio was a lynchpin of hobby electronics, Radio Shack never sold ham radio gear. I mean, they'd sell you a 10-pack of resistors for $1 but they would never sell a transceiver or antenna -- which I think would have been much higher margin than those resistors.
Eventually moving into the "battery membership club" business....
Radio Shack sales tactics got on my nerve in the 70's, 80's. It was clear that everyone in the store got some kind of a commission — the way they would hound you. (Pushy salespeople are never a positive for the customer.)
My interest in electronics led me to apply there in around 1980 or so. It turns out I should have instead been interested in selling if I was applying there. My interview question (yep, there was an interview for a 16 year old applying at a local Radio Shack store) had nothing to do with knowledge about electronics as I had hoped. Instead I was handed the nearest thing to the manager, a stapler, and told, "Sell me this stapler."
And I'm thinking the customer either wants to buy the stapler or does not — there is little I am going to be able to do to get them to buy a thing they don't even want. Further, I don't even want to be doing that: maybe they need the money for something more important.
I don't remember exactly what I said (I think I was a little confused actually – caught off guard). But you can imagine that, given my perspective on the idea of hard-selling anyone, I was pretty lackluster in my enthusiasm.
Needless to say I was not offered the job. (Probably just as well, ha ha.)
My local Petsmart is aggressively having their employees push their app. I finally had enough and asked the employee if they have been instructed to push the app, and they said it is a deliberate directive "because they were late in the app 'game'". With this "late to the game" mentality, I can only imagine they are using all of the tracking software to maximize any earnings they can. That's just my suspicion, to confirm one way or the other is outside my wheel house
I read an interview with "Famous Amos", who was asked about his fascination with cookies. He replied, "IRDGAF about cookies. If it hadn't been cookies, I would have sold something else."
I was offended. I couldn't grasp that he was so nakedly honest about his desire to make a fortune by hawking /something/.
I think that it would be hard to find knowledgeable employees to sell everything. The sales process would be way more technical. When they started selling computers nobody knew much about them.
It would be a dream job for a young ham but a disaster for a corporate guy putting together training for non-ham employees that would be making minimum wage.
I worked at one of their computer centers - I wasn't a great salesman either, because I didn't want to sell something to someone who didn't want it, but I did all right. They had a heyday and blew it.
I gotta admit, though: the TRS-80 series was a wonder, all told. You could legit go from a Model I to a 6000 running a full UNIX (Okay, it was XENIX, but still!)
You'd never WANT to do that - even running the 6000 on XENIX was a bad idea compared to running XENIX on an 80386, never mind that it was XENIX. This was back before SCO turned evil, anyway. But you COULD!
They also sold a lot of CB radios and walkie-talkies. I don't remember ham radios per se but it's not something I was ever really in to during the heyday of Radio Shack. I had a couple of their walkie-talkies as toys when I was a kid; they were just low-power CB channel 14 radios.
There must have been a middle where radios weren't sold, because radios were always present when I was going to radio shack. I remember my friend buying an RC car (Radio Controlled) from theShack with a boat load of their batteries. Very distinct memories of having the mall security chasing us after he opened it up and was driving it around the mall. They were also into radio gear like tuners and speakers for home/auto.
This very selective memory of theShack not offering radio equipment is divergent from my experience
I remember them having quite the selection of CB radio gear though. When I was young getting into video production to the point of needing my own cables, I learned the hard way about the difference between 50-ohm and 75-ohm cables.
The amazing thing to me is that they later purchased GRiD (rather than buying a GRiDcase III Plus, I should have invested in something...) but couldn't continue their success selling to Military/Police.
Stuff I desperately wish I'd known about early computing:
- the patch to make the cassette copy of Pascal work on TRS-DOS --- I think that might have made for a markedly different trajectory in my life --- c.f., Microsoft BASIC vs. MacBasic on my first Mac: https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
- that the "Softporn Adventure" was going to become a popular franchise and to keep, rather than remove the printed label on the erased disk I got as a blank from a local computer shop
- that Ultima was going to be important enough to me that I would miss the cloth map which came w/ my copy of Ultima II
- that I should have waited and got a Radio Shack PC-2 and its plotter, or better still a Radio Shack Model 100 rather than a PC-1
Ah well, at least I kept the poster I got from a copy of _Creative Computing_:
The first computer I remember using was a Tandy from the late 80s or early 90s (I don't recall what model, I'll have to ask my dad if he remembers). The jump from that to a PC running Windows 95 was mind-blowing to me.
Readit News
Quite unexpectedly, Tandy/Radioshack's computer business has gone kaput, but Tandy leathergoods still exists and has operating stores more than 100 years later.
Many of the trendsetters often fade into the past, as they are overtaken by their rivals (a certain electric car company comes to mind).
Maybe we can convince them to restart production ;-)
This part is kind of amazing. They recognized the potential of computing, and wanted to have it for their use, but didn't think anybody else would want to do inventory management?
Really good projects fail for all sorts of really stupid reasons. It shouldn't be considered amazing to reduce the risk of a new and unproven product with a backup plan that makes use of nearly 100% of the unsold inventory. ;)
These two shops - the former a means of access to the TRS-80, the latter a means of access to the Apple II and Atari 800 computers - were my "second class-room", inasmuch as I learned so much in the few hours I got away with hacking there.
The TANDY salesmen were more than willing to let us kids play with their systems, but we were never allowed to use the disc drives (now I know why, finally) - whereas the COMPUTER AGE salesmen, once they noticed me furiously typing away every day after school, gave me a floppy disc to save things. This floppy disc was a constant accessory and a major source of hassle with my regular school teachers, who didn't have a clue what it was and were mostly just miffed with my obsession over it. "What is that thing and why do you carry it everywhere you go?", once teacher asked me during a break, to which my precocious answer was "its the future, lady!", earning me a visit to the headmaster for disrepect (catholic school...)
The TANDY I'd go to was in the middle of a shopping district in one of the wealthiest parts of town (Subiaco, Perth, Australia), and the COMPUTER AGE was located in the midst of all of the wealthy schools of the city (Claremont), which meant I was constantly battling with rich kids to gain access to the machines .. eventually I witnessed a wave of rich kids disappearing from the shops as they got their systems unpacked at home, but I could never afford it, so was a regular with the salesmen. One of the COMPUTER AGE guys noticed this one day, and it formed the basis of a long friendship.
I'll always remember those halcyon days, when things were really very adventurous. I'm pretty glad I never got to save much on the TRS-80's, as it gave me more motivation to study "The Apple Way", and that eventually led me to gaining access to modems and BBS's and things, which were always more fun on Apple than the TRS-80.
So its pretty nice to hear the backstory of Tandy, ultimately, as a shoelace vendor that became a digital pioneer.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanafuda#History
Radio Shack sales tactics got on my nerve in the 70's, 80's. It was clear that everyone in the store got some kind of a commission — the way they would hound you. (Pushy salespeople are never a positive for the customer.)
My interest in electronics led me to apply there in around 1980 or so. It turns out I should have instead been interested in selling if I was applying there. My interview question (yep, there was an interview for a 16 year old applying at a local Radio Shack store) had nothing to do with knowledge about electronics as I had hoped. Instead I was handed the nearest thing to the manager, a stapler, and told, "Sell me this stapler."
And I'm thinking the customer either wants to buy the stapler or does not — there is little I am going to be able to do to get them to buy a thing they don't even want. Further, I don't even want to be doing that: maybe they need the money for something more important.
I don't remember exactly what I said (I think I was a little confused actually – caught off guard). But you can imagine that, given my perspective on the idea of hard-selling anyone, I was pretty lackluster in my enthusiasm.
Needless to say I was not offered the job. (Probably just as well, ha ha.)
I was offended. I couldn't grasp that he was so nakedly honest about his desire to make a fortune by hawking /something/.
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/405815708832?_skw
It would be a dream job for a young ham but a disaster for a corporate guy putting together training for non-ham employees that would be making minimum wage.
I gotta admit, though: the TRS-80 series was a wonder, all told. You could legit go from a Model I to a 6000 running a full UNIX (Okay, it was XENIX, but still!)
You'd never WANT to do that - even running the 6000 on XENIX was a bad idea compared to running XENIX on an 80386, never mind that it was XENIX. This was back before SCO turned evil, anyway. But you COULD!
https://www.eham.net/reviews/view-product?id=288
This very selective memory of theShack not offering radio equipment is divergent from my experience
Stuff I desperately wish I'd known about early computing:
- the patch to make the cassette copy of Pascal work on TRS-DOS --- I think that might have made for a markedly different trajectory in my life --- c.f., Microsoft BASIC vs. MacBasic on my first Mac: https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
- that the "Softporn Adventure" was going to become a popular franchise and to keep, rather than remove the printed label on the erased disk I got as a blank from a local computer shop
- that Ultima was going to be important enough to me that I would miss the cloth map which came w/ my copy of Ultima II
- that I should have waited and got a Radio Shack PC-2 and its plotter, or better still a Radio Shack Model 100 rather than a PC-1
Ah well, at least I kept the poster I got from a copy of _Creative Computing_:
https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_11970...
Really do need to get it framed....