Ghosts of Radio Shacks Past
The first computer I ever saw came from Radio Shack. It’s hard to believe that Radio Shack – that saddest and saggiest of strip mall outposts – was once a lively destination. There, under bright fluorescent lights, one could find all sorts of mysterious gewgaws. In addition to radios and speakers and remote-control cars, they had all manner of servos, fine gauge wires, hi-fi cables, xenon tube replacements, and miniature audio output transformers. Row after row of incomprehensible components for the electronics enthusiast in your life.
My dad was such an enthusiast. He frequented Radio Shack the way other men visited peep shows. He knew it was a slightly embarrassing activity, but he couldn’t tear himself away. Unlike the peep show aficionado, however, Radio Shack was a destination to which one could drag one’s whining and unwilling children. My brother and I used to spend what seemed like hours in there with him as he delicately fingered various, incomprehensible electronic components tacked onto pegboards in neat little plastic baggies. He loved gadgets. Little things that beeped and whirred. Things with blipping lights. Oscillators whose wave forms could be adjusted by the turn of a dial. And one of the very first consumer computers.
The TRS-80 was a bulky desktop computer whose software had to be loaded via cassette. Cassette! Not that there was much software available for the thing. We had a pinball game drawn with x’s and o’s that took about twenty minutes to load every time we wanted to play. Maybe it had a crude spreadsheet, too, and a program to teach you BASIC, an early computer language. The cost: around $600, close to $3,000 in today’s dollars.
Why my dad wanted a $3,000 computer that did almost nothing is unclear to me, but I suspect it represented an exciting gee whiz future arcing away from the glad-handing good time Charlies who made the world run, and towards soft-spoken cerebral types – geeks - like himself. Maybe he had an instinct that one day people like him would turn the tables on the so-called Masters of the Universe with their slicked-back hair and structured suits.
Initially, Radio Shack executives were reluctant to enter the computer market. Their most expensive product to that point was a $500 stereo, but Radio Shack was looking to expand their appeal beyond tinkers and hobbyists towards more-heeled consumers with fatter wallets. The gamble paid off. Although the company estimated sales of around 3,000 per year, the announcement of the new computer crashed the company’s switchboard and “six sacks of mail arrived at Tandy headquarters asking about the new computer.” There were waiting lists. At the end of the first year, Radio Shack had sold 55,000 computers that promised little more than the ability to “do a payroll for a company of up to 15 people, teach your children mathematics, store your favorite recipes or keep track of an investment portfolio. I can also play cards.” My dad had neither a payroll nor any favorite recipes to store. He never taught us kids mathematics, and he didn’t play cards. What the hell did he need it for?
When we kids visited him and our stepmother every other weekend, he would abscond to the little alcove at the top of the stairs after dinner and spend hours peering at that harsh black-and-white monitor overlaid with a thin green plastic sheet to reduce eye fatigue. I have no idea what he did on there, but there never seemed to be enough time to do it. He’d be up all night tapping away on the keyboard. When he let us kids get a shot at it, we’d load our pinball game on cassette and bang away at the keyboard. “Easy,” he’d admonish us. “Easy.”
Even as a kid, I understood something about my dad. He was more comfortable with gadgets that people. Woodworking tools, cameras, ham radios. He liked fiddling with stuff. Tinkering. He liked things that could be disassembled, their components arrayed into methodical order. Things that could be explained in ways that we children and his ex-wife could not. He didn’t dislike people. I think he just didn’t understand them very well. My mom told me that when they went to parties together, he would find a quiet corner somewhere, pick up a book, and read. Perhaps today we would say he flirted with the spectrum, but there was nothing particularly odd him other than his introversion and his fondness for tiny JRR Tolkien figurines, which he painted with fine brushes under a giant magnifying glass affixed to his desk. He married again, to a lovely and warm woman who didn’t mind his foibles. Neither did we kids. We liked him fine the way he was.
He died young, at 39. I’ve relayed the story of his death in my books and on This American Life. (You can probably find it if you’re interested.) One small mercy is that he didn’t live long enough to see Radio Shack file for bankruptcy protection in 2015. Anybody walking into Radio Shack in those years would have found flickering lights and the rattling chains of ghosts from an analogue past. If you bought a battery-operated barking dog for your children during those years, just know it is most likely haunted and will eventually murder you in your sleep.
There are still Radio Shacks out there, now owned by a Chinese conglomerate. They lurk in dying shopping centers around the country. Their stock of contraptions and components were beyond my ken as a child and remain so now that I am an adult, an adult considerably older than my dad ever was. Every now and again, though, I will enter one of their stores and just kind of wander through for no reason other than it reminds me of him.
The world he imagined has come to pass. Men and women like him – geeks - now rule the world. The “personal computer” is so ubiquitous we can no longer envision our lives without it. I wish he could spend a day with me now just to see it all. The Internet, tablets, smart watches. I think he’d be delighted at the future men like him brought into being. I don’t know what happened to that TRS-80 on his desk. I suppose it got packed up when he died. Maybe donated to Goodwill. Maybe buried in a landfill. I wish I had it. I wish I could load up my crappy pinball game on cassette and play a few rounds, tapping the keyboard flippers to keep the game going just as long as I can. Easy, easy.
(All Radio Shack information gleaned from Wikipedia.)
My first programming class was long ago, long before Google and Apple, at a time when “personal computers” were just starting to be a thing. The class was part of a four-semester progression in BASIC, and our teacher, a full professor, told us if we wanted to do “really well” after school, to get a doctorate in computer science and work in the field. She said we could write our own salary checks...and she was pretty much right.
Even today, long after I have forgotten pretty much everything I knew, I still often think of BASIC ‘if-then’ processes, especially whilst playing silly computer games like Monopoly. “If 2+ 2, Then =4”
I love this, Michael. Your Dad and my Dad could've have had a grand ol' time sitting silently in opposite corners of my Dad's "shop" amid circuit boards and the whiff of soldering wire. My Dad brought home a Sinclair in the early 80's. The monitor was a portable tv which I would snag in the middle of the night so I could watch Night Tracks under the covers in my room - (a tiny, snowy, black and white screen and the volume extremely low so as not to get busted). My Dad, like yours, spent an enormous amount of time with it. My brother got on board and learned to write code and program games. My Dad wrote a program that kept track of carrier pigeons and sold it to folks through a magazine for carrier pigeon enthusiasts, geeky before it was cool. I'm sorry you lost your Dad so young.