Today in Tedium: For many reasons, largely related to a shifting business model incompatible with modern tech needs, a whole generation of people saw RadioShack as less a store for tinkerers and more a place to buy commodity tech products. It was a business model that fell out of sync with the enthusiast community that once championed its products, and the twice-bankrupt RadioShack has been paying the price for that pivot ever since. But buried in the recent news about store closings—which have largely decimated a chain of thousands of locations—is the fact that the company is auctioning off much of its storied history in a Ubid estate auction that’s going on for the next month or so. Today’s Tedium takes a look at the tech hiding in Radio Shack’s long history, which is better than you think. — Ernie @ Tedium Quick shoutout: Thanks to everyone helping us out via Patreon, especially Ari Weinstein, whose app Workflow was acquired by Apple earlier this year. (We featured his interesting hobby a while ago.)

(James Case/Flickr) Flavor in your ear: These tiny, colorful transistor radios were extremely hackable RadioShack was famed for its numerous private label brands—most famously under its longtime parent brand Tandy (which, no kidding, started as a leather goods company before it took RadioShack national in the 1960s), but also Optimus, Archer, Micronta, Science Fair, and a few others. The most visible of these brands, however, was Realistic, which the company launched in 1954 under the name Realist. The Realistic brand covered a number of electronic products, but perhaps the most famous ones were the Flavoradio portable radios—which usually were sold in AM-only formats, but later as AM/FM devices. A set of three of these devices is currently selling in the auction for $32. For roughly three decades, RadioShack sold these transistor radios, which were notable for both their simplicity and their color scheme. The simple design and low cost, of course, made them quite hackable. In 1989, the amateur radio-focused 73 Magazine wrote a cover story titled “Flavorig!"—a tale of how to turn the cheap device into a CW (Continuous Wave) transceiver, a common mode of ham radio communication associated with Morse Code. “Enjoy your Flavorig,” author Michael Grier wrote in the issue. “For such a simple beast, it works remarkably well. Once you make a contact on a rig you built yourself, you may find that ‘940 gathering dust while you experience the thrill of pounding out your call on a 5 watt box!” It wasn't the only hack of its kind, either: One user, inspired by a magazine article, figured out how to take the roots of the Flavoradio and turn it into a shortwave tuner. “It wasn't fantastic (there was an awful lot of spectrum crammed into the 180 degree rotation of the tuning knob), but it worked well enough to bring in a surprising number of broadcasts, and exhibited an amazing ability to select a single signal out of a big pile of stations all lumped together,” Patrick Innes wrote on his Earthlink site in 2001. It may have been intended as a cheap radio for mass consumption, but it was secretly a Raspberry Pi for radio-heads.

“It’s obviously an electronic upgrade of the old fortune-telling Magic 8-Ball, though it lacks the poetic spirit that could express sentiments such as ‘Future Hazy Try Again.’” — A 1984 article in PC Magazine describing the Executive Decision Maker, a gimmicky product that reminds folks that RadioShack, when it wanted to, could take on The Sharper Image toe-to-toe. The device, up for auction here basically relies on a series of LED lights that float around and land on a series of six options—an approach which can be seen in action here.

The RadioShack Tandy 102. (mk97007/Flickr) RadioShack’s most influential computer might have been a portable device with a tiny screen and a full-sized keyboard The TRS-80 Model 100 and the Tandy 102 computers were never particularly powerful machines—just small ones, ones that spoke to what would prove to be an important trend in the long run. Based off of the company’s better-known TRS-80 desktop computer, the devices came about in the late ‘80s as a way to write simple programs and quick text files. First released in 1983 as the TRS-80 Model 100, it was one of RadioShack’s most consistent sellers, originally sold with the tagline “The Micro Executive Workstation.” In a 1984 book on how to use the TRS-80 Model 100, author Kensington Lord noted how impressive the scale of the machine was, considering its functionality. “Thirty years ago the computer was larger than most houses and consumed enough power to light your neighborhood. It required enough air conditioning in a single day to cool your house for a week,” Lord wrote. “Those who worked with the machine were trained in mathematics. The programs were literally wired into the machine. Today the computer weighs less than a sack of sugar, is programmed in simple nonmathematical language, and can communicate with other computers a room ... a city ... or a world away.” Despite its design looking closer to a portable typewriter than a laptop—and despite the device basically being a svelte version of the TRS-80 Model 100—the Tandy 102 earned positive notices, with the New York Times recommending the machine to college students as a note-taking device. The device was also said to be popular with journalists in the pre-laptop era. A review from InfoWorld’s Mark Stephens suggested the device was much more useful than a similar portable product from Atari, the Portfolio pocket PC. But the problem was that the device never really evolved all that much after its original release. The 102 shifted the form factor of the 100, but didn't push things forward enough to ensure the platform’s long-term success. “In the documentation, packaging, and on the 102 unit itself, there are no copyright dates more recent than 1985,” Stephens wrote. “This is old technology, designed to do a good job for reporters, salesman, and others who need to prepare and transmit short text files.” But that said, a later machine that was slightly less functional, the AlphaSmart 3000, earned rave reviews from writers not too long ago after its lack of distractions was held up as a virtue. One has to wonder whether RadioShack missed a market opportunity by failing to keep this device up with the times.