The Shack on Life Support
Going..... going..... going..... not quite gone.
Yet.
Bankruptcy is pretty much imminent though.
In today's "throwaway society", there's just no longer a need at the storefront level for diodes, transistors, and 52 colors/sizes of electrical wiring.
I have many memories of "The Shack". A few.....
- thumbing thru their thick catalog on cold winter days
- visiting the store monthly to redeem my free "battery of the month" card
- purchasing various little kits to build various little electrical things
- Dad helping me when the previously-mentioned little kits didn't do squat once assembled
This is a great little piece on what Radio Shack meant to many of us, our imagination, and to our nation (if the link does not work, the entire thing appears below):
See if you can relate to any of this.
Out for now.....
Matt
RadioShack Sparked Joy of Tinkering
Ron Grossman
Copyright © 2014 Chicago Tribune
With RadioShack on life support, those of us whose fingers show old soldering iron burns face a doomsday prospect: a world without blister packs of the resistors and capacitors with which we transformed the family's kitchen table into a scientific laboratory.
For many decades, little packages containing the innards of a radio hung on racks in electronic parts stores all across America. Most such stores have vanished through successive generations of scientific marvels: television, which is something to be watched, not built; and computers, which perform miracles on your behalf without you having to break an intellectual sweat.
Now its corporate parent has announced that bankruptcy may be in the offing for RadioShack, once the Holy Grail of youthful experimenters with fantasies of being the next Edison or Marconi. Most of us never realized that dream, though many a Silicon Valley whiz kid started the voyage to fame and fortune with a trip to RadioShack or a competitor.
Most of us RadioShack alums remained nerds, forever addicted to taking a screwdriver and opening up a commercial product to see how it works. RadioShack was our hands-on training in scientific method — a much richer introduction than you can get from staring at a computer screen. Or from a grade school science class, at least in my youth. At our public school, cutting-edge science was collecting leaves and pasting them in a nature scrapbook.
Looking at a world map hanging on the wall, a classmate once observed that if you could squish Africa and South America together, they'd fit, like a giant jigsaw puzzle. He got a stern rebuke from the teacher, who said he should forget such nonsense. Years later, the theory of continental drift proved his point.
So much for fostering creativity, in the 1940s.
But bring home a few vacuum tubes, a variable condenser, and some hookup wire from RadioShack, and the mysteries of nature lay at your fingertips — albeit at the cost of a few ouches from dropping hot solder on them. You assembled the parts on a device called "breadboard" that, unlike your mother's breadboard, had rows and columns of small holes into which the electronic gizmos fit. Wire and solder linked them together, according to diagrams that magazines like Popular Mechanics and Popular Science used to publish.
Plug the contraption into an electrical outlet and, with any luck, you had recapitulated the process by which Guglielmo Marconi had invented radio. Alternately, if you'd crossed wires or misread the diagram, the breadboard would produce smoke, a fuse would blow and the lights would go out. But such was the beauty of the breadboard — that you could move the surviving parts to different holes and redo the experiment according to your best guess as to what went wrong.
Scientists do just that on the way to translating a hunch into a breakthrough — though without parents' suggestions that maybe one disaster was enough for a day. Besides, the table was needed for serving dinner.
I still experience a thrill at recalling my own first breakthrough. Radios were then powered by vacuum tubes, a bunch of them in a store-bought model, maybe one or two in a homemade radio. There was also a zero-tube radio, the ultimate learning device. It used a crystal — the distant ancestor of the transistor — and was popular with parents because it didn't need electricity, hence no trips to the basement to replace blown fuses. The trade-off was that it needed a monstrously long antenna mounted as high up as possible.
So my father and my Uncle Bill climbed up on the roof of the apartment building where we lived, strung a wire the length of it and dropped it over the edge toward our second-floor apartment. As they brought it through a hole drilled in the sill of our living room window, my mother had a look on her face suggesting she would prefer me to go back to stamp collecting. But it turned to a look of mother's pride when I shouted out that I'd heard a radio station through the earphones of my crystal set.
Trial and error, failure and success, you can't get that experience by collecting leaves. Once you've pasted the first bunch, you've pretty much exhausted the potential for understanding the process by which science advances. But lessons learned from building simple radios are with me still: You need to know much power is needed to get so much current through a resistance? Ask me, I'll recite Ohm's Law. Why are some stations called AM and others FM? It depends on the modulation of the signal they send out.
Which is not to say that kids of the future will be intellectually deprived for not having the experiences that yield those factoids. They'll have other ones, no doubt. When cellphones came in, our 7-year-old granddaughter showed me how to use one. Besides, the thrill felt by my generation of nerds was already dimming long before RadioShack's potential demise, a side effect of progress. Transistors replaced vacuum tubes, those fragile glass devices that gave off a mysterious saffron glow. Then transistors, resistors and other electronic components were combined and miniaturized into computer chips.
I tried to catch up with electronic progress by taking a course in repairing computers. When we opened up one, I was stunned to see what was inside: a motherboard, something like a breadboard, but without its flexibility. If it didn't work, the instructor said, we should throw it out and get a new one.
Now, I'm not a moss-backed opponent of progress. My cellphone has as many apps as the next guy. Yet for something gained, something else is lost. So when the last blister pack is removed from the last electronic parts store, I'll mark the end of an era with a period of mourning.
I promise to keep my apps off for 30 days. So help me RadioShack.
