Browse 64 Years of RadioShack Catalogs Free Online … and Revisit the History of American Consumer Electronics

“I bet RadioShack was great once,” writes for­mer employ­ee Jon Bois in a much-cir­cu­lat­ed 2014 piece for SB Nation. “I can’t look through their decades-old cat­a­logs and come away with any oth­er impres­sion. They sold giant wal­nut-wood speak­ers I’d kill to have today. They sold com­put­ers back when peo­ple were try­ing to under­stand what they were. When I was a lit­tle kid, going to RadioShack was bet­ter than going to the toy store. It was the toy store for tall peo­ple.” Yet by the mid-twen­ty-tens, it had become a “pan­icked and half-dead retail empire”; in 2015, it final­ly filed for bank­rupt­cy.

Still, all those cat­a­logs live on, free to browse in the dig­i­tal archive at Radioshackcatalogs.com. The first vol­ume dates from 1939, by which time Radio Shack (as its name was orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten) had already been in busi­ness for sev­en­teen years. “This cat­a­log is intend­ed to serve as a com­pre­hen­sive and accu­rate list­ing of what we believe to be the essen­tial and unusu­al require­ments of the radio ama­teur, the ser­vice­man, lab­o­ra­to­ries, indus­tries, and schools,” declares its open­ing let­ter to the cus­tomer. “To boast of our ser­vice in any respect would be so much use­less ver­biage, ser­vice hav­ing been the fea­ture of our growth.”

Nei­ther ser­vice nor growth remained fea­tures of the com­pa­ny by the time Bois was work­ing there. But it had been a pret­ty glo­ri­ous run: to behold the first 50 years of RadioShack cat­a­logs is to behold noth­ing less than the evo­lu­tion of Amer­i­can con­sumer elec­tron­ics. At first direct­ed toward those with seri­ous tech­ni­cal know-how, the com­pa­ny’s offer­ings expand­ed over the decades to appeal to hob­by­ists, then to ordi­nary peo­ple look­ing to intro­duce a bit of elec­tron­ic — and lat­er, dig­i­tal — enrich­ment into their pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al lives.

Some Amer­i­cans found their way to RadioShack by build­ing crys­tal radios and sci­ence-fair projects in child­hood; oth­ers began fre­quent­ing its stores while build­ing their first real hi-fi sys­tem, com­po­nent by com­po­nent; oth­ers still got into per­son­al com­put­ing through the store-brand TRS-80 (or “Trash 80,” as more seri­ous com­put­er nerds called it). My own grand­fa­ther was such a habitué that, when he died ear­ly in the nineties, our house sud­den­ly filled up with inher­it­ed RadioShack-only prod­ucts, from Real­is­tic radios to Tandy com­put­ers. (I remem­ber spend­ing many hap­py hours with the Mod­el 100, a prim­i­tive lap­top grand­ly mar­ket­ed as a “Micro Exec­u­tive Work Sta­tion.”)

“This is a con­sumer tech­nol­o­gy busi­ness that is built to work per­fect­ly in the year 1975,” writes Bois. And indeed, the 1975 RadioShack cat­a­log offers page after won­drous page of remote-con­trolled stere­os (“the ulti­mate in lux­u­ry”) and “action radios”; fiber-optic dec­o­ra­tive light­ing fix­tures, eight-track car tape decks; cal­cu­la­tors promis­ing a “pock­et­ful of mir­a­cles”; and built-it-your­self inter­coms, pock­et lie detec­tors, and “col­or organs.” Alas, like so many com­mer­cial enter­pris­es that rode high in the mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry, RadioShack failed to take advan­tage of the inter­net, and was ulti­mate­ly crushed by it — an iron­ic fate indeed for what had so long been the one-stop tech­nol­o­gy shop. Enter the archive of RadioShack cat­a­logs here.

via MetaFil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

IKEA Dig­i­tizes & Puts Online 70 Years of Its Cat­a­logs: Explore the Designs of the Swedish Fur­ni­ture Giant

A New Online Archive Lets You Read the Whole Earth Cat­a­log and Oth­er Whole Earth Pub­li­ca­tions, Tak­ing You from 1970 to 2002

Watch “Hi-Fi-Fo-Fum,” a Short Satir­i­cal Film About the Inven­tion of the Audio­phile (1959)

Nir­vana Plays in a Radio Shack, the Day After Record­ing its First Demo Tape (1988)

The First Cell­phone: Dis­cov­er Motorola’s DynaT­AC 8000X, a 2‑Pound Brick Priced at $3,995 (1984)

One Man’s Quest to Build the Best Stereo Sys­tem in the World

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.