General Mills Computer 4032

Of course, I gather Radio Shack wasn't in such great financial state when Tandy bought it, so it may not have stayed the course anyway. Forty years is a long time to hold a grudge against Tandy for taking over Radio Shack.

Radio Shack was just regional before Tandy, so that it changed didn't matter that much to most people. I would argue that the expansion after Tandy bought them did bring the parts they did carry into new areas, at a time when the old school electronic stores were closing down or about to (because the owners were ready to retire, because rents had gone up, because the field was changing with the arrival of transistors and then ICs so a universal store was no longer feasible). The first time I went to an electronic store, it was 1971, and I picked a place out of the Yellow Pages. But then I soon learned it was a cluster of places, all with wooden floors and varying from old tube stuff to semiconductors only. Not one of those stores in the cluster still exists, and it's been about a quarter century since the last one closed down.

No, Radio Shack was a lousy place to buy parts after Tandy bought them, because the parts were overpriced and limited in selection. But for a lot of people, it was the place they could get parts locally. And that still holds true today to some extent, forty years after Tandy bought the small chain and years and decades after the hobby magazines from back then stopped publishing.

Michael