Posted on 01/01/2015 4:17:15 AM PST by mkleesma
Found this site online, thought I'd share it with anyone interested - it has full, viewable scans of just about every Radio Shack catalog since 1939. Enjoy!
I spent a lot of time in the mid 1970s looking through Radio Shack catalogs. Mostly stuff to build home stereo speakers, and CB radio gear.
I ended my catalog days just as the TRS-80 PCs started appearing.
You sure that wasn't Heathkit?
Very cool...
In the 70’ I build a car alarm using 555 timers and a capacitive switch. All you had to do was touch the door handle and the thing would start it’s sequence.
Oh, and then there was the negative signwave sync supressed TV circuit.
Might have been from Heath...
A guy I knew in the radio biz bought one back in ‘69 or ‘70.
Thanks!
I have always been a TRS fan.
Same here. Radio Shack catalogs and Estes model rocket catalogs. Thanks for the link. Brought back a lot of memories.
When I was in fifth and sixth grades, I used to carry the Fisher Scientific catalog around with me. It was hardcover, and as thick as a phone book.
I also had Estes, Centauri, and Allied Electronics catalogs. I loved them.
I remember that the last Allied catalog I had had listings for integrated circuits. RTL and DTL, no CMOS yet if I remember correctly. A dual J-K flip flop was something on the order of $190. I remember they had something called an "excess-three grey encoder," I never figured out what that was.
That would have been in 1969 or 1970.
I had Radio Shack catalogs too. I used to buy lots of parts from them. My dad bought me a Realistic reel-to-reel tape recorder when I was in sixth grade. $69, which was a lot of money back then. I was over the moon with delight. 7" reels, monophonic, ran on 110VAC. Was the size of a toaster oven. Seems like nothing is that size today. Nothing electronic, anyway.
To open the link, do you need to provide your address and telephone number?
I see somebody else mentioned “Heathkit.” Then there were Allied and Lafayette too. Big catalogs.
I was hooked on the Edmund Scientific catalogs, as a kid.
“To open the link, do you need to provide your address and telephone number?”
No - just click on the yellow box labelled “General Catalogs”.
I still have a couple of police scanners from Radio Shack. All the local agencies have gone to digital systems, making those scanners pretty much useless. I don’t have $500 to spend on a digital scanner.
Oh yes! How could I have forgotten about them!
I remember their catalogs very clearly.
Telescope mirror grinding accessories. Erfle eyepieces. Diffraction gratings. Ronchi rulings. All kinds of lenses in "good," "better," and "best" quality catagories.
When I moved to Philadelphia in the early '80s, I used to drive over to their headquarters in Barrington NJ. They had (maybe still have) a big showroom there. I bought a spool of unclad optical fibers there, which I still have to this day, down in my basement.
I built a Heathkit SB-102 SSB transceiver when I was in high school. Worked too. Used it until I lost interest in ham radio, some time in college.
I think you missed the humor — Up until about ten years ago, Radioshack demanded personal information like address, telephone number, and birth date, for even the most trivial of cash purchases.
bm
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