The quote about Woz using a TRS-80 for phone phreaking is a misquote of the referenced Wireless article. I'm sure the "one" that Woz bought was a touch tone dialer, not a TRS-80.<p><i>Read about the biggest tech stories of the 20th century, and RadioShack keeps popping up: Long before he founded Netscape, Marc Andreessen learned to program tooling around on a TRS-80, one of the first affordable personal computers and one of the first devices RadioShack ever produced. Kevin Mitnick, the first hacker ever on the FBI’s most-wanted list, learned his trade on the demo models at RadioShack because he couldn’t afford a computer of his own. John Draper, the phone phreaker known as “Captain Crunch,” hacked his way into free long-distance calls using a Touch Tone dialer he bought from RadioShack.</i><p><i>Woz bought one too, and he says it cost him a fortune. He used it for the now-infamous Blue Box, which he and Steve Jobs used to make their own free calls without interference from Ma Bell. Without RadioShack, there’s no Blue Box. And as Woz tells it, without the Blue Box there’s no Apple.</i>
I'm sad to see Radio Shack so far from the "builders" market.<p>I had to run to RS this weekend to try to find a part, only to find 3 salespeople who had no idea of how components or soldering worked. They seemed amazed that I would actually design my own circuits, while I look at what I am doing and consider it to be a bit amateurish. :(
Never thought I'd see Polycom on HN. Interned for 2 complete years at Polycom, mainly writing internal tools and doing random IT work. I had little oversight and was free to use any framework/language to solve a variety of problems -- I ended up teaching myself a ton of stuff which led to freelance gigs. Lots of cool older engineers, but I got the feeling the culture was dying off.
These things are great devices and very functional. Still, I curse these guys since they enabled people to waste countless hours of my time over the years on ridiculous conference calls that would have been better handled by . . . email.<p>Oh wait, I hate email too.<p>But I loved the old Radio Shack. On a tangential note, Tandy Leather Co. took a precipitous dive as well. Where have all the makers gone, whether of circuits or leather things?
The book shown in the article was authored by Robert G. Middleton.<p>Link:
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000IDA7ZC/" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000IDA7ZC/</a>
>> Working from those insights, we built our first physical model in a single weekend using plastic panels from the hobby shop, hot glue, and an off-the-shelf paper-cone speaker.<p>Who needs a 3D printer?
I love my Polycom Soundstation.<p>I only wish I could figure out how to get SSL certs properly loaded onto the phone. Spent multiple hours trying with no success. =(
Took me a while to see where the article was going, and was plenty surprised to see...that thing...the conference room speakerphone that was, in my experience, somewhere between barely functional and purposefully infuriating. I do not have a high opinion of the product after using it. Much like Bose. Hooray for making a lot of money, Monster Cables & Beats headphones style though.
By that measure, lots of successful companies have been founded with information from the internet. If said information was obtained from the public library, was the initial investment ~$0?
"[book] gave us the secret ... sealed enclosure created two separate acoustic environments ... one inside the speaker enclosure ... and one outside, where the microphones were"<p>I would have thought that part of the design would have been self-evident?<p>As a TRS-80 owner starting in 1979 I also morn the loss of the inventor/creator version of Radio Shack - hung out there often walking back from school and many started learning BASIC programming (which at the time included hand-assembling Z-80 code in read/data statements and POKEing them in) in the store.