ON FEBRUARY 5th, the day the beleaguered chain of Radio Shack electronics stores filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the mail brought your correspondent a $35 Raspberry Pi 2 credit-card-sized Linux computer he had ordered online weeks before. The two events were wholly unrelated. Yet, the coincidence could not have been a more poignant reminder of all the developments over the decades that brought Radio Shack low.



The hobbyists who fuelled Radio Shack’s rise—and made its stores the go-to place for electronic parts for home-made amplifiers, radio receivers, stereo equipment, even TV sets—had given up the ghost or gone elsewhere. Today’s “maker movement” is every bit as active as the hobbyist and do-it-yourself communities of decades ago, but its practitioners do things differently. Radio Shack never responded to the technological changes that were driving its loyal fans away.



At the peak of its popularity in the 1970s, Radio Shack (owned since 1963 by Tandy Corporation of Fort Worth, Texas) had over 7,000 neighbourhood stores spread across three continents. They sold every conceivable electronic knickknack—from resistors, capacitors and diodes to cables, test gear and soldering irons. In hindsight, that probably contributed to the problem. In many places, there would be three or four Radio Shacks to choose from, all within a 15-minute drive.



But once inside a store, eyes would widen at the array of components on offer—hinting, temptingly, at still other projects yet to build. Better still, the sales staff could put a finger on precisely the packet sought, and then knowledgeably explain why some other component might do a better job.



No discussion of amateur electronics would be complete without mention of Heathkit, famous also for its kits of parts for assembling test gear, radio equipment, hi-fi systems, television sets and home computers. Above all, Heathkit was known for the quality of its manuals. They provided not only detailed step-by-step instructions, but also the theory behind the product being assembled. If truth be told, Heathkit—with its well-regarded bits and bobs for radio hams—had a more legitimate claim to the title of “radio shack” than Radio Shack.



Things started going pear-shaped for suppliers of electronics kits in the 1980s. The seeds had been sown a decade earlier when Radio Shack—spurred on by its success with products for citizens-band radio—introduced the TRS-80 personal computer. Like CB radios, the TRS-80 (short for Tandy Radio Shack computer using an eight-bit Zilog Z80 microprocessor) came factory-built—not as something customers could assemble themselves at home. This was at a time when early PCs, such as the Altair 8800, had all been sold solely in kit form. The “trash-eighty” hit the market around the same time as the first Commodore and Apple computers and, for a while, handily outsold both of them.



Numerous derivatives followed. Your correspondent bought a TRS-80 Model III and promptly replaced its cheap RCA white-on-black television tube for a proper green-on-black screen. He also added a third-party board to remap the read-only memory, so it could use the popular CP/M operating system rather than Radio Shack’s limited TRS-DOS with its primitive graphics. But that was the limit of the tinkering possible with such a factory-built product. The Commodore and Apple machines were even more locked down.



From then on, Radio Shack became hooked on pricier, pre-assembled products. When kits and components dominated its business, the average sale in Radio Shack’s busy little stores was said to be $30. By contrast, the first TRS-80 sold for $600. Later systems cost $2,000 and up. That may have been acceptable for small businesses, but was well beyond the reach of Radio Shack’s hobbyist following. Besides, with the introduction of home computers, a generation of enthusiasts taught themselves to program, and then whiled away their spare hours writing software instead of soldering components onto printed-circuit boards.



Radio Shack’s migration from components to commodity products gathered pace after AT&T, America’s telephone monopoly, was dismantled in 1982. Subscribers then became free to buy their own telephone equipment, instead of having to rent it expensively from Ma Bell. Numerous retailers, Radio Shack included, rushed to offer phones and answering machines, along with all the paraphernalia needed to relay the signal throughout the home. In so doing, though, the firm found itself squeezed between big-box retailers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart on one side, and specialist telephone suppliers on the other.



After a failed attempt to build its own chain of big-box stores, Radio Shack subsequently sold its six most profitable outlets (out of the 17 it had opened) to Fry’s Electronics. The only surprise was that Radio Shack limped on for as long as it subsequently did.



Could Radio Shack have prospered if it had stuck with its loyal band of hobbyists? Fry’s Electronics certainly did. Since its founding in 1985, Fry’s has managed to do all that Radio Shack ever dreamed about: sell consumer electronics, household appliances, mobile phones, computer hardware and software—as well as electronic components and circuit boards, while also offering in-store hobbyist advice and repair work.



Most electronic hobbyists have long since abandoned Radio Shack for shopping online or, if in a hurry, the well-stocked aisles of electronics superstores like Fry’s. All too often, your correspondent has found himself going to Fry’s for a $7 cable, only to come out with a new motherboard that was on special offer, plus a further eight-gigabytes of memory—happily handing over $150 or more for the pleasure in store. That is the kind of fat-margin business Radio Shack abandoned for the cut-throat world of selling mobile phones.



That modern electronic products like the Raspberry Pi come pre-assembled says much about how the hobbyist movement has evolved. True, Arduino boards—a series of open-source microcontrollers from Italy, with numerous extension cards and other circuits—can still be bought in kit form for home assembly. But today’s enthusiasts tend to get their kicks more from connecting and programming electronic parts to do useful things, rather than simply making a box of tricks from scratch and having the thrill of seeing it work for the first time.



There is a good reason for this. By the late 1980s, integrated circuits, even whole systems-on-a-chip, had begun to replace the discrete components used previously. Meanwhile, “surface-mount” technology—pioneered by IBM decades earlier—started to displace the industry’s standard “through-hole” method of soldering individual components to printed-circuit boards. Surface-mounted components were much smaller, cheaper, more robust and could be packed closer together to form extremely compact units.



Unfortunately for hobbyists, surface-mounting did not lend itself to traditional soldering. The tiny components had minuscule feet for connectors instead of lengthy wire leads that could be easily grapsed by even dumpy fingers. To speed production, the electronics industry adopted an automated “reflow soldering” process for bonding the miniature components to the printed-circuit board. Such equipment, costing far more than hobbyists could ever imagine owning, put an end to the era of the hand-soldered circuit board.



Where does that leave the digital tinkerers of today? To some extent, the maker movement has become the home for many a do-it-yourself enthusiast interested in robotics, drones, 3D-printing as well as electronics. Like the kit-builders before them, today’s makers adhere to much the same ethos of “learning through doing”, while also sharing ideas, tools and skills in much the same friendly way.



Lately, the maker movement has attracted the attention of educators, as a way of getting youngsters interested in the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) they so widely reject these days at school. The personal satisfaction and insights that come from actually making things on the bench and seeing them work in practice—as opposed to being taught, in a dry and meaningless classroom manner, the textbook theory behind the phenomena in question—could inspire countless young minds to delve deeper into the nature of things. Many might then find themselves, almost without realising it, that they had embarked upon a lifetime's adventure of learning and discovery.