The days of the electronics hardware hobbyist are pretty much over—at least as I grew up with them in the 1980s.

A Bloomberg report yesterday said RadioShack Corp. is in talks to sign a bankruptcy deal that shuts down the 94-year-old retail chain for good, giving half its stores over to Sprint and the other half closing entirely.

Several decades ago, RadioShack was indispensible, as crazy at that seems now. The company even helped launch the computer revolution in 1977 with the TRS-80, one of the first viable home computers along with the Apple II and the Commodore PET.

Electronics hobbyists used to consider RadioShack indispensible. Years ago, there was no Amazon or Circuit City (itself defunct). If you needed a funny-looking plug to connect two of your stereo components together, or if you wanted to find a way to make the VCR in one room play on a TV in another room, RadioShack was where you went—period. Want to solder together wires for your remote-control car's motor or servos, upgrade your ham radio setup, buy a new multimeter, or hack a memory card into an old 8-bit computer for flash storage? There's only one retail chain that would almost definitely have what you needed.

For decades, the company made an inexpensive, industry-standard dB meter for sound and mixing engineers (pictured, right). And speaker wire—oh, the rolls and rolls of speaker wire and RCA cables I purchased there. My fingers have the battle scars to prove it, from all the copper wire stripping and twisting. You could get it all pretty inexpensively; in a world of useless $80 Monster Cables, RadioShack had your back for much less money. Two bucks extra would get you the fabled "gold-plated connector," which to this day does nothing for you, but sure as hell sounds like it does.

Unfortunately, those days have long past—how many people do you know with stereo components now? Home theater enthusiasts persist, but most people have moved on to much smaller and wireless consumer electronics. There's certainly still a booming computer hardware community, as you can see by all the CPU, video card, and other component coverage out there. And Arduino and the Raspberry Pi have enabled a new maker community hacking together things that don't normally belong together.

It's Almost Over

RadioShack no longer has a place in any of this. These days, the stores are pretty barren and devoid of useful electronics parts, and Amazon can mail you anything in a day for less. I wouldn't mourn the RadioShack of today—basically all it sells now are cell phones and overpriced accessories for them, along with unnecessary extended warranties.

And now the end is in sight. The latest news follows several years of one bad earnings report after the next for RadioShack, so it's little surprise to see this happen. We've all been watching the slow death of the entire chain, barring some crazy deal involving people that think there's still brand equity there. As this article from The Onion highlights, that hasn't been true for years.

The thing is, RadioShack certainly worked hard to alienate its customers even years ago. There were the pushy salespeople, for starters. I remember back in the 1990s, a friend of mine got sick of how RadioShack would harvest all of your contact information whenever you tried to buy something at the retail counter. Back then, the salespeople literally wouldn't ring you up unless you gave them your name, address, and telephone number, so they could mail you a million catalogs. My friend Pete went one step further; whenever they asked him for his address, he gave them the one for another nearby RadioShack that he had memorized. This way the two RadioShacks would mail each other the catalogs.

This was all around the same time my friends and I used to jokingly call the store Radio Scrap, because of all the tiny spare parts it sold. There was even a fake store in the Sierra On-Line game Space Quest IV called Radio Shock, in an obvious homage to the real thing.

I grew up thinking RadioShack stores were important and necessary, even if the retail experience wasn't always great. And despite the hollowed-out shell of its former self that the retail chain is now, it still sucks to see things you used to care about fade away.

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