Forget Radio Shack, anyone remember Heathkit?<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/30/business/plug-is-pulled-on-heathkits-ending-a-do-it-yourself-era.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/30/business/plug-is-pulled-on...</a><p><a href="http://img807.imageshack.us/img807/5103/h100cat851.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://img807.imageshack.us/img807/5103/h100cat851.jpg</a><p>I remember puzzling over everything in the store as a kid, it was fascinating and I couldn't afford anything but the free catalogs. I knew those super-dooper expensive computers were the future. (Eventually built a Heathkit AM radio).
> But it also served as a portent that the hands-on way of life RadioShack embodied would become irrelevant.<p>Well; yes and no. I think a lot of 'tinkerers' now spend their time hacking. I know I prefer programming to fiddling around with little bits and pieces that have to be bought and assembled. It's a much more "self-sufficient" world in that you <i>don't</i> need to pop out to Radio Shack to buy that little piece you're missing.
At least my neck of the woods (New England, well-educated town), electronics tinkering is alive and well, mostly in the form of robotics competitions. There's a _lot_ of robotics clubs around here, starting with Mindstorms and working up to a handful of high-school students who design circuit boards and send their mechanical part designs out to 3D prototyping houses.<p>Notice, also, the popularity of Make magazine, the Arduino, and the open source hardware movement. (Not to mention the self-replicating 3D printer geeks.)<p>RadioShack, I think, is largely a victim of Digikey and other online component retailers. It just doesn't make sense to devote much sales space to resistors and bread boards in a modern mall, when you can get any imaginable part shipped to you in a couple of days.
On a related note, if you love(d) RadioShack, be sure to check out Akihabara ('Electric Town') in Tokyo if you ever get a chance. <a href="http://www.kirainet.com/english/radio-center/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kirainet.com/english/radio-center/</a>. I have never seen so many electronic components on sale in one place. It was even possible to find "vintage" ICs.
I applaud what this guy is doing and I hope he can get new business from it, but for most RadioShacks it's a lost cause.<p>I was last in a RadioShack a week ago to find a spool of wire-wrap wire. The salesperson didn't even know what I meant, so he just let me look around until I found it. It's kinda sad because I'm old enough to remember being a kid drooling over their huge component selection and going in every day to look at the short wave receiver I wanted for Christmas and being able to have an intelligent conversation about electronics.<p>But when I bought components yesterday, the $40 or so I spent at BG Micro (<a href="http://www.bgmicro.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.bgmicro.com</a> support these guys, they're nice :-) would have been close to $200 at Radio Shack even back when they carried most of that stuff.<p>Don't mourn Radio Shack -- experimentation, kits, and hardware hacking is bigger than ever. It's just moved online along with everything else.