i miss this lil nigga like you would not believe - /diy/

Anonymous05/02/26, 23:30No.2988916

I miss this lil nigga like you would not believe.

Replies

Anon05/03/26, 05:53No.2988956

Same. They were great in the 80's. If I needed a connector or a patch cord I could stop in and buy one, cash, without hassle. Now you have to go online to whatever supplier/distributor, navigate piss-poor layout of a webpage, select your item, use a payment method that requires more hoops to jump thru, then you gotta wait 4 days or more for it to appear at your door. And that's assuming it's in stock and not taking 6 weeks from chinkville.

Anon05/03/26, 06:06No.2988957

poured 1 out for the loss of dis hommie

Anon05/03/26, 07:47No.2988975

I just had to order some thermal fuses for a freezer I was fixing and I thought of radio shack. I think they did sell these.

Anon05/03/26, 09:29No.2988987

Pretty much, they got bought out by investment bankers when the brand was failing. Just like any other electronics supplier at the time, Maplin in the UK, Dick Smith in Aussie/NZ. What killed these places is that they gave up on their hobbyist base and started to sell cheap electronic toys, laptops, phones and people lost interest in them.

Anon05/03/26, 17:00No.2989040

There are a ton of olaces online that do it better now. Essentially the SEARs of electronics.

Anon05/03/26, 17:54No.2989051

Expensive, limited selection, and shit quality. If you had the dough you could build some cool stuff with the things they carried in the 80s like the speech chip.Failed to make the transition out of malls and the shift to phones was unfortunate. Micro Center has a business. Batteries+ has a business. So radio shack could have had a business.

Anon05/03/26, 19:22No.2989065

They were always over priced and started going down hill in the 80's by the 2000's they were shit. I generally only went there when I needed electronic components because they were close. I got a ton of stuff when they closed. I got about $600 worth of stuff for about $60.They went to shit when they started selling phones, computers, and other mainstream electronics. people not having hobbies as much is partly to blame.

Anon05/04/26, 17:28No.2989224

I do not miss their batteries.

Anon05/05/26, 01:31No.2989275

Yeah:( I was there on the final week of one near me. A couple of us cleaned it out of any relays, power transistors, diodes, etc.

Anon05/05/26, 04:14No.2989286

Nostalgia bliss with the engineer's mini notebooks. https://www.worldradiohistory.com/BOOKSHELF-ARH/Radio_Shack_Books.htm

Anon05/05/26, 12:15No.2989339

I wish I had bought thousands of sealed type IV cassette tapes when they were sold for 2$.

Anon05/19/26, 18:41No.2991692

I still break out my 2017 Newark catalogue every once in a while. But back in the 90s, early 2000s, a radio shack was my third home.

Anon05/20/26, 06:02No.2991746

Anon05/23/26, 19:41No.2992277

Found this in my basement, brand new, even has the floppy disk for PC connection. They dont make em like they used to.

Anon05/24/26, 17:40No.2992442

but unironically though. radio shack was rad to go to when you juts needed One Thing for a project.normies are more into diying shit and arts n crafts post-coof and if radioshack came back it would probably do about as well as Michaels

Anon05/24/26, 18:55No.2992458

The last thing that I bought from Radio Shack was a VHS rewinder. This was long after other stores had stopped carrying them, but I knew I could rely on Radio Shack to keep outdated devices in stock. Now I just scavenge the local thrift stores.

Anon05/26/26, 14:01No.2992806

Private equity ruins everything.RadioShack could have saved itself. There was a trend in DIY electronics with the Maker scene. RadioShack slept on it. They could have sold thumbdrives like Micro Center. They didn't. They could have sold Raspberry Pis and Arduinos. They barely did. They could have sold 3D printers...if they were at every store. USB Adapters. USB Extension cables. You'd think this would be their bread and butter. They half-assed it with cheap shit.The reason they didn't do anything: There private equity handlers starved it to death so they could sell it for...well, parts.If there was some place you grew up with in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s like K-Mart, Jo Ann's, or Radio Shack, it was likely left to rot so it could be picked apart.

Anon05/27/26, 02:46No.2992908

That's called "vampire capitalism". >buy it >suck it dry >dispose of the corpse >CEO's pat themselves on their backs for improving shareholder value >get bonus >repeat Modern-day business SOP. It's all about the shareholders. Everyone else can fuck off.

Anon06/16/26, 12:58No.2995834

I still have one in my town

Anon06/29/26, 19:59No.2997854

i miss this lil nigga like you wouldnt believe

Anon07/05/26, 23:42No.2998572

in 2006 i fucked mike v on the train tracks behind a radio shack

Anon07/06/26, 00:48No.2998580

I dont live near a microcenter, its like 3 hours away. I happened to be there for the holiday weekend.I popped in to look at the electronic components and microcontroller boards. They got rid of the giant wall of components and replaced it with more 3d printing shit.They have half as much as they used to, and the components are highway robbery prices. 10 pack of rectifier diodes was $15.99, I was blown awaySAD! I used to wish I lived next door to one, but at these prices and selection its not even worth the drive.

Anon07/06/26, 01:19No.2998584

You can buy leaky caps and low quality knockoff micro processors off aliexpress fag

Anon07/15/26, 07:53No.2999795

my university had an electronics supply store in the physics building 10s of thousands of parts were available on demand, and you could have the bill sent to the appropriate lab i miss that dearly, i hope they still have it, i haven't seen anything like it even at world-class unisa place like radioshack should have put up online storefronts complete with data sheets such that you could put together an informed order and pick it up at the store the same day

Anon08/05/26, 14:48No.3003017

Little known is that part of that lag in the refresh cycle was due to the cancelled Color Computer Deluxe. This version had better graphics, Yamaha sound, a typist style keyboard, and expanded IO interfaces. The project was cancelled close to production when Motorola cancelled production of the new video chip that was to be the heart of the Deluxe CoCo. Tandy had already produced thousands of keyboards for the new model, and ended up selling the keyboard on its own in Radio Shack stores as a generic product. There was a lot of fallout inside the company over this and serious talk of discontinuing the CoCo line. Instead it was decided that because sales were still strong, they'd develop the new graphics system internally instead of relying on Motorola. That's what became the CoCo 3, about two years too late, and for some reason it dropped the Yamaha sound chip that was part of the Deluxe Color Computer.

Anon08/11/26, 00:19No.3003892

my town still has one

Anon08/11/26, 05:20No.3003920

Radio Shack: You have questions, we have blank stares.

Anon08/11/26, 11:35No.3003955

I don't at all. Fuck the pre-internet era. When I want small electronic parts they show up at my house and I don't waste hours driving to poke through a pile of bottom tier junk.

Anon09/07/26, 13:08No.3007296

As a non-burger I see RadioShack mentioned a lot by Electronics books. Where do Americans get their gizmos and bits now? You guys have to wait 3 months from Aliexpress like us now?

Anon09/09/26, 03:51No.3007538

There was near my grandpas campground up until last year. Going to a RadioShack in 2025 was pretty surreal, kinda like going to the last Blockbuster. Coincidentally, the same town also had one of the last Ponderosa steakhouses in existence