> ...but more importantly available a few miles away within practically any city.

We're around the same age and likely have similar memories. I poured over Radio Shack catalogs and weekly ads when I was a kid. When my family went to the local mall I'd make a beeline for the Radio Shack and play w/ the various computers there until my parents pried me away.

When I started doing PC tech work (in rural Western Ohio in the late 90s) it was always an option, no matter how far out in "the sticks" you were working, to drive to a Radio Shack for emergency parts. They might not have exactly what you needed, and you'd probably pay a hefty price, but you could get the job done.

That ubiquity definitely left an impression on IT technicians of my generation. I was recently doing some work w/ a legacy system that called for some serial gender-bender/null modem cables. Not having any handy I had to improvise with some DE-9 to RJ-45 hoods and creative crimping to get what I needed. A cow-orker commented "We used to be able to just go to Radio Shack when we needed stuff like that in a hurry."

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HeyLaughingBoy 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> DE-9 to RJ-45

Few things impress me more than someone using shell sizes correctly :-)

	▲	EvanAnderson 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks. I considered saying "8P8C" for the jack, as well. >smile<

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blooalien 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> When my family went to the local mall I'd make a beeline for the Radio Shack and play w/ the various computers there until my parents pried me away.

Sounds like my childhood. Remember the Tandy TRS-80 CoCo? I do. :)

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EvanAnderson 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Absolutely! There would inevitably be a CoCo on display and that's the machine I'd play with.

A common BASIC program I'd write on new-to-me computers was a FOR/NEXT loop to print all the characters in the character set. I remember discovering the color semigraphics characters in the CoCo character set and being weirded-out. I'd never seen anything like that on any of the other machines I'd ever used.

I snared a CoCo2 a few years ago so I could re-live a few of those memories (and explore the machine with actual documentation).

	▲	thijson 41 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		My favorite part of that era was subscribing to Rainbow magazine. Every month when it arrived, reading it cover to cover a few times. I didn't have access to any dialup in those days, so this was my only window to the whole ecosystem. I remember a box of 5.25 inch floppies were horrendously expensive at Radio Shack, maybe it was just our store though, I grew up in a small town in Canada.
	▲	blooalien 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Ah, the nostalgia. Those early days of home computers were sure some amazing times. Possibilities were infinite. Who'da thunk that we'd carry freakin' supercomputers (compared to those early machines) around in our pockets someday? Not me. LOL!