Is Optimus the other in house brand you’re thinking of?
Thanks. I still don’t remember where I heard that. At the time, I was amazed that Tandy Leather was still around. They have a large store on the south loop in Fort Worth with full-sized cow hides hanging in their display window.
And the TRS-80 Handheld Computer. My father-in-law had one to try out some commodities market algorithms he came up with. I taught him how to program in BASIC for it. This thing wasn’t bad considering the obvious limitations.
I’m just old enough to remember their big ‘tube tester’ machines in the back (late 70s?) Didn’t really know what it was, but it looked cool!
Some drug stores had them, too. I’m pushing to remember that. 
Stores like Two Guys had them also. This was a discount department store in the North East. We had several small independent electronic parts stores around and they all had tube testers.
I was fixing TVs at a young age as it was really as simple back then as unplug, stay away from the metal box with the high voltage warning and pull any suspicious tube (blacken) and take them to be tested and then replace the bad ones or spraying the control knobs with contact cleaner and rotating them a few dozen times. This worked great except for the time when I put the cover back on the main set and screwed up dropping it and breaking the back of the main picture tube. Then my parents had to call in a professional repair man. I was probably 11 when I did this.
I had built up a bag of tubes from old sets people were tossing and kept a very old black and white set going for years longer than it probably should have.
You are aware that 1979 was 36 years ago? Plenty of companies have cratered from huge successes that were far more recent.
I thought you had the name wrong, but I checked my old catalog stack indeed that was the name. There was one sort of near me. Went there a several times. Nice be able to buy opto-isolators, odd type resistors and such without having to scout around the smaller places.
Didn’t last long.
I haven’t been to a standard parts places in a very long time.
Radioshack.com emphasizes the corporate dimwittedness. Hey, drive here and buy stuff like you can off the Internet!
And then there was Incredible Universe.
I would have sworn that it had a different name for a while, then only switched to Radioshack.com after several years. That’s actually why I was trying to Google it to see if I could find the original name but can’t find any evidence of it, anywhere.
I had a TRS-80 CoCo2 in the mid-'80s and at the time kind of resented it for not being a C64.
But the TRS-80s in general had excellent manuals that taught you BASIC from top to bottom. Really, those computers bred a whole generation of coders.
I had a C-64 and when in graduate school and IBM 8086 for machine code and C.
The oldest radioshack.com catalog I have has an intro letter suggesting it’s a new thing. It took some effort to find a copyright date in it: 1999. 3 retail stores listed. But I wonder if that was just a name change. The name I keep thinking of is something like “PartsAmerica” or some such. But searches along those lines suggest an old car parts site.
Radio Shack has been operating under that name for as long as I can recall, going back to the 1970s (and, I’m sure, much earlier).
They sold stuff under the Realistic brand, as noted above. And their advertising touted that they were “A Tandy Company”, but “Radio Shack” was always the name over the store.
I remember my dad back in the 60s pulling off the back of the old console TV set and pulling out tubes. Then we’d go to the drugstore, put the tubes in the tester, and if they were bad, the store sold replacement tubes. He’d buy the new tubes, take them home, put them into the set and it would work as good as ever. It really was a do-it-yourself job then and you saved the cost of a TV repairman making a call. They would come to your house. You didn’t take the set to them because they were so big and heavy. The repairman would fix the set right in your home, or if he couldn’t fix it there, he would take it back to his shop.
We were replacing tubes in our TV set in the 1970s. As I remember, there were maybe a dozen tubes of various sizes. When the TV stopped working, we’d pull all of them (carefully labeling where each came from) and go to Radio Shack to test them and buy replacements. This was, I think, only for the B&W set. I can’t remember doing this for a color television.
This was a specific superstore concept they had. I don’t know how many there were but there was one in Denver maybe 2004 or so. I thought it opened under a different name, but I just can’t find it. But either my memory is faulty, or they eventually changed the name but it was a physical store named “RadioShack.com” that lasted 3 years or so.
And of course, now that I search Google for it again, this thread is the top search return :smack:
Maybe I should look through Alta-Vista archives or something like that, that was big back then.
Because Gogol knows you’re a Doper. Seriously.
Search again from a private browsing window and SDMB will be weighted much further down the results.
Are you thinking of Incredible Universe? There was one in Sacramento that I visited once, and once only. A Disneyland of greed-shopping with trams and fun for the kiddies and endless nonsense, something from a Mad magazine parody of the 1950s.
Besides being approximately the size of the Pentagon, they had the distinctive feature of a sort of ironwork dome, maybe 100 feet across and 60 high, painted a tasteful purple.
The Sac one turned into a Fry’s a few years later. The dome thing is red now.
Screw that place. I’m glad to see it die. Worst place I’ve ever worked, hands down. Good riddance.
No kidding. I remember working 60 hour weeks for just under $300. Then, at the end of the year, where you might get lucky and get a few big easy sales, management had the balls to cut your pay rate! :mad:
Fuck The Shack.