Scanner Tales: Radio Shack Stuffage

[w2lpa]

Great stories and reminiscing! Our Mall Radio Shack had a gray carpeted floor and smelled like stale cigarette smoke. Bought components there to build little things. Later in the 90's a couple of CB's and a scanner. In the late 70's and 80's .. computer stuff: I'd save up my money and buy a game in a ziploc bag off the shelf. I would stop in, or haunt the place if I was going to the mall with the family. There was another kid who hung around there all the time - I don't recall him ever not being there whenever I stopped in - that was well versed in electronics and stereo equipment in particular. He'd built pretty much every electronic kit you could get from RS, everything from the Forrest Mims books, projects from those "101 Electronic Projects" magazines, and many Heathkits. No one's really mentioned the TRS80 .. but it changed many of our lives and sent us on a path. Store managers were all different. One liked that I would sit down and compose little display programs or load and play a game (from cassette ), as it attracted attention to the computer. Others didn't and shooed me away.

 

[MiCon]

Stuffage (noun): materials and items related to a specific general topic.

Good write up. RS had a well deserved poor reputation in it's final years, but before that it was the go-to store for communications and electronic parts. I bought my first CB transceiver (HE-20c) at Lafayette Electronics in 1965, and at some point I had a Bearcat 20 channel programmable scanner, but I started in 1971 with the first RS scanner, an eight channel base/ mobile crystal receiver, and stuck with RS products for about thirty years until they went belly-up. I didn't realize it until recently, but I have about fourteen RS scanners sitting around. I'm currently using about eight of them, the newest being over twenty years old.