It was the corner hardware store of the tech revolution, a nerd fountainhead for the do-it-yourselfers who invented Silicon Valley. Eventually, they all needed a 9-pin null modem adapter, a capacitor or a VGA plug to get their startups off the ground, and so they made their way to Radio Shack.

“I remember going up and down the rows at Radio Shack just looking at resistors,” said Steve Wozniak, who built the first Apple computer by hand, then co-founded the most successful electronics company in history. “I was a browser with no money at all. I just loved to look at all the electronics parts being sold. It was actually a part of my education.”

Now, Radio Shack is engaged in a do-it-yourself death dance, on Tuesday closing the first wave of 1,784 stores that will shut their doors by the end of the month. The electronics chain declared bankruptcy Feb. 5, following years of declining sales, and will sell its remaining 1,750 stores to Sprint, the wireless carrier. Radio Shack”s heyday was the mid-1970s, when the sale of citizens band radios accounted for 30 percent of revenues. But its real resonance resided in the raw materials the stores provided to every aspiring computer geek, gamer and audiophile. Long before Maker Faire, Radio Shack was to DIY for.

“I like to tinker, and Radio Shack was my childhood resource,” said Nolan Bushnell, who co-founded Atari in 1972. “It was the only place that you could buy a resistor.” Or a new switch for your old coffee percolator, a signal splitter for your Sony Betamax or a 50-foot cord for your headphones.

But as someone recently posted on Boingboing.net, “It”s not like, ”I need a new RJ-11 to 3.5mm phone recording splitter because my bird bit through the old one” is a reasonable business” model. The online marketplace that Radio Shack helped create by selling modems, routers and all manner of couplers now undercuts it with razor-thin overhead. When Julie Chulick of San Jose pulled up at the Radio Shack on Blossom Hill Road last week, her shopping list seemed to sum up what had sealed the retailer”s fate.

“I”m looking to find an old fashioned flip phone because I don”t want an iPhone,” she said. “I thought I would see if they still have them because they used to carry them.” She conceded it had been a while since she”d visited one of the chain”s stores, and most of her previous visits had been for her husband, who liked to fly remote-controlled model planes. “I would go in with a little note saying this is what he needs,” Chulick recalled. She said the stores were “more a guy thing.” Another customer at the store, named Alex, lamented, “The old way of doing business is gone.”

When new ways of doing business come along now they are called “disruptive,” and maybe Radio Shack”s problem was that it never disrupted anything. When Wozniak was in college, during the 1971-72 school year, he developed a phone hacking device called a blue box that he and Steve Jobs sold. It relied on diodes Woz bought at the Shack, so when he and Jobs created their first computer, the Apple I, they went back to their old supplier. “We started calling Radio Shack to see if they wanted to buy it and give us some royalties,” Woz said by phone from Dubai, where he was lecturing on the secrets of his success. “They said they only paid 5 percent royalties on a design. We thought we had something big, so 5 percent royalties kind of turned us off.”

But by the time he and Jobs released the Apple II in 1977, Radio Shack — which by then had been bought by the Tandy Corporation, producer of a line of do-it-yourself leather clothing — released the TRS-80, a personal computer with such primitive skills it became known as the Trash 80. “What the Trash 80 did was popularize the idea that computer technology — the parts that make computers — actually had a value worth selling in a store,” Wozniak said. “There were only three companies that jumped in to making computers right away — Apple, Commodore and Radio Shack.” Making and marketing its own computers in stores made Radio Shack a distant forerunner of Apple Stores” multibillion dollar retail operation.

Radio Shack also missed a chance to sell Atari”s wildly popular computer game, Pong, when one of its buyers attempted to use the chain”s clout to lowball Bushnell at a consumer electronics show in 1975. “He says, ”Now look, sonny, I”m going to tell you how it”s going to be,”” Bushnell recalled. Atari was wholesaling the games for about $50, and Sears was selling them for $70. “He says, ”You”re going to sell them to me for 30 bucks, and not a penny more.”” When Bushnell protested that he would lose money on the deal, Radio Shack”s man stormed out.

“Universally in Silicon Valley at that time, Radio Shack was hated,” Bushnell said. “When they were hot, they were arrogant. A lot of people don”t understand that ethics and humanity are a good business strategy.”

If he was taking any pleasure in this reversal of fortune, Bushnell didn”t show it. “There are going to be a lot of do it your selfers in small town America who are going to be slowed down by this,” he said, “because now, instead of going down to Radio Shack, they”re going to have to send away for parts.”

The future will just have to wait.

Contact Bruce Newman at 408-920-5004. Follow him at twitter.com/BruceNewmanTwit