The time is near to bid farewell to that old security blanket, RadioShack. When the remote control broke, it was there. When we needed a cable or 20, it was there. But soon, it won't be.

The company is about to file for bankruptcy. Shares of its stock have been suspended from trading. We are forced to acknowledge that the era of personal electronics championed by the franchise stores that sold soldering gear and robots and had a Battery of the Month Club is really and truly over. Of course, we already knew that. When you can have exactly the thing you need over-night delivered to your door, there's no reason to endure the actual social contact required of going into a store.

We here at WIRED are feeling a little blue about this totally foreseen turn of events. Where will our reporters run to when their tape recorders need a new tape in the middle of a Pulitzer-worthy interview? Oh, right. Everyone uses iPhones or Livescribes to conduct interviews now. Come to think of it, we haven't seen a minitape in over a decade. Are we part of the problem? (Of course we are.)

Oh, RadioShack, thank you, we're sorry, and goodbye.

Here are some of the reasons we loved you.

RadioShack Was Great for Nerdy Pranks

Mark McClusky, WIRED’s current head of operations, had this Despicable Me–branded megaphone thing. It was horrible. Made ripping wet fart sounds. He kept trying to get me to take it home, but the last thing I need in my house of one husband, an aging dog, and two young boys is a gun that makes fart sounds. But when we moved offices, he left it on my desk in the dark of night. When I discovered it there on the morning of moving day, inspiration struck. I put the fart gun in my banker’s box and carried it home. That Saturday I went to RadioShack and wandered vaguely around the store, fumbling with the little blister packs, trying to figure out how to make my scheme a reality. I asked the two guys up at the counter for help. I told them about the awful fart gun. “And what I want to do is record the noise onto a chip and attach it to a motion activated sensor that I tape under his desk. Then, whenever he sits down, it’ll play the fart noise.” They cracked up so hard and immediately collected up parts I could daisy-chain together; they were helpful, kind, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable. I brought my loot home but the bits and pieces of it quickly vanished into the chaotic mess that is my six-year-old’s room—I never ended up visiting my revenge on Mark. Which is too bad, and even this act of writing it out has made me want to go back to the South Shore RadioShack in Alameda and get another tutorial and bag of electronic components. Watch where you sit, McClusky. —* Sarah Fallon*

Great for Love

In high school I remember buying my first splitter at RadioShack—and marveling at the fact that I could now listen to my Walkman with my boyfriend. —Caitlin Roper

Great for Aspiring DJs

In high school, I put together a shitty little DJ and recording studio set-up in my bedroom. A lot of my gear—namely my mixer, one of my turntables, and all of my mics—was made by Realistic, RadioShack’s house brand. Realistic was a decidedly uncool brand, and so whenever I’d play out, I’d kind of hide the logo on my mixer with my wallet. Later, I really appreciated when the great E-40 dropped this here entertaining rap lyric in the song "1-Luv”: "This ain't no happy Shirley Temple tale-istic crap. This here is serious more Realistic than RadioShack.”

Listen (with timestamp): #iframe: https://www.youtube.com/embed/FN1pQBnU-P4||||||

\—Eric Steuer

Great for Eagle-Eyed Journalists

In my not-fact-checked memory, RadioShack distinguished itself for being early to the trend of collecting data on its customers. There I’d be, trying to buy AAA batteries or some obscure (legal!) phone-call recording device at the RadioShack in the Castro in 1995, handing over a 10-dollar bill, and the cashier would request my phone number. Took me a couple of transactions to catch on before I refused. Thanks, RadioShack, for getting me in the habit of withholding personal data from large corporations. Oh, and for the batteries. —Joanna Pearlstein

Great for Getting Out of Dodge

When I was a kid in the late '90s living in a town called Dodge, North Dakota (population 117), the closest RadioShack was 100 miles away. That probably seems like an insane distance to travel to go to RadioShack, especially with how far the now-bankrupt store has fallen from its former glory. But back then, personal computers and the internet were new and exciting and gave me and my three siblings a desperately needed connection to the outside world (after all, we could not get the hell out of Dodge). RadioShack gave us the cables and scanners and phone lines (ahhh, dial-up!) we needed to access the universe beyond our shrinking rural town. And let's be real: We'd also wreak mayhem in the store, jacking up the volume on display TVs, unwrapping Tamagotchis we'd never buy, and enthusiastically test-driving RC cars into the ankles of fellow shoppers. We were monsters. Thanks for putting up with us, RadioShack! I'll always think of my time in your aisles fondly. —Samantha Oltman

A RadioShack store in Toronto in 1993. Ken Faught/Toronto Star/Getty Images

Great for Father-Son Bonding

My dad and I took a programming class together at a local RadioShack in the early '80s. It was the basics of BASIC, basically. The back room of a RadioShack somewhere in Los Angeles—I have no memory of where; it’s not like I was driving—is the first place I ever handled floppy discs. It was the first place I sat in front of a computer (a TRS-80 Model III) and typed

10 PRINT “ADAM”

20 GOTO 10

Can you imagine the power? The feeling of mastery? And then, when you find out (if I remember correctly) that if you put a semicolon on line 10, your name will cover the whole screen instead of just a column? Come on. Learned that at RadioShack.

Also, Dad was something of a HeathKit addict. Nobody remembers HeathKit now, maybe, but it was a company that would send you all the parts for various electronic components and you’d solder them up yourself. I made a digital clock; Dad built an equalizer, amplifier, and a pre-amp, which oh my God was I not allowed to touch at all for any reason, because those buttons and switches and levers were all set just so. But they also looked very much like the control panel of the Millennium Falcon, so...yeah, I probably messed with them a little. Point is, anytime something went out of whack with those components—and indeed, whenever we needed more solder, or the stuff you use to remove solder, or a soldering iron, or the armature that you hold a printed circuit board with while you solder on it—we were back at RadioShack.

But weirdly—and maybe this is why I became a reporter and not an engineer—I mostly wanted to buy parts to make something that looked like electronics. I wanted to try to make a pretend spaceship console, or a ray gun, or some kind of analyzer gadget like a tricorder. The desire to actually build something that worked didn’t grab my soul. My programming skills never progressed beyond being able to display my name, despite multiple attempts to learn. Our first computer wasn’t a TRS-80 or, sadly, the very cool Model 100, which, how badass does that thing still look? No, it was an Apple //e. I don’t think I have soldered since I built that digital clock.

But I used that clock until I left for college. —* Adam Rogers*

RadioShack’s TRS-80 Micro Computer System on display at the Boston Computer show on August 25, 1977. CM/AP

Great for Close Contact With Salespeople

When I was in college I'd borrow and beg to use other people's cables and tape recorders rather than suffer the indignity of the local RadioShack. The employees there would follow you around the store bullying you into making purchases, breathing over your shoulder as you compared prices. It was tedious and odorous. Once, broke but needing some cord or other for a class, I paid in change, counting out first quarters then dimes and eventually pennies from a mason jar as the RadioShack guy seethed at the register. I resolved to never return. But then this holiday, over a decade later, I had to go to one again, and my heart melted. The sales were so steep that I bought my husband a bluetooth speaker he could listen to on his bike. Why not for $14.99? The employees were kind—was that a knowing sorrow in their eyes?—and they had exactly the three things I came in to buy. Just as RadioShack is leaving us, I finally came to appreciate it. —Emily Dreyfuss

Great for Being There for You

Growing up in a small Nebraska town in the 1990s, if you wanted any sort of mainstream technology device there was one place you'd go: RadioShack. For a long time, it was the best and only option we had. Then Best Buy opened.

RadioShack was sandwiched in between Bath & Body Works and a store that sold Yankee Candles. It sat directly across from a food kiosk called Pretzelmaker, which increased its property value tenfold for a teenage girl. Even in a shitty, tiny mall, you still got the sense that going to RadioShack was a concession, a last-ditch effort to find what you were looking for. I always found that strange. For whatever reason, I preferred RadioShack's curated (limited, some might say) offerings to Best Buy's frenzied, endless rows of TV screens and printers.

Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure I've visited a RadioShack in almost every city I've lived in since: batteries from the RadioShack in that Los Angeles strip mall, a phone adapter from an empty store in midtown Manhattan, a voltage converter from the one in Omaha. RadioShack maybe didn't always have everything you needed, but it did have a way of being in the right place at your most desperate times. There has to be a business model for that, right? —Liz Stinson

Great for Day-Drunk-Inspired Spontaneity

One Saturday afternoon post-“bottomless brunch,” my friends and made an important trip to RadioShack (after first stopping by the liquor store to snag a few bottles of Andre). The goal: watch GBF on the TV screen back at my apartment. What did we need to achieve it? An HDMI cord and a Macbook adapter. The store had both. I still have the HDMI cord, but no adapter. Guess now if I ever need one of my own I’ll have to order it from Amazon, which won’t really allow for the same level of spontaneity—at least until drones can deliver it to me.

\—*Lydia Belanger *

Great for Robbie the Robots

I will just say this. I had Robbie the Robot. It was my favorite Christmas gift ever. EVER. —Billy Sorrentino