For more than 70 years, RadioShack was an electronics hobbyist’s paradise. It has lost several times over the past decade and is now sold for parts. Its X account is famous for selling crypto with eye-catching NSFW posts. But RadioShack’s glory days live on thanks to the extensive archival efforts of RadioShack Catalogs—a website that meticulously compiles seven decades of store catalogs.
From 1939 to 2011, RadioShack has published a catalog that allows users to browse its various electronic beats from the comfort of their own home. Some of them are hundreds of pages long and provide a window into America’s past. What was Raytheon before it was a missile company? Page 8 of the RadioShack catalog shows you the friendly Raytheon that sold vacuum tubes that replaced radios.
The entire catalog is available in a digitized and easy-to-read format. Browsers even play an audio clip of the page being turned as you navigate through the catalog. “In a world where technology continues to advance, this digital archive ensures that memories, products, and innovations of RadioShack will be forever accessible to those who wish to remember and appreciate the lasting impact of this iconic retailer,” the site said.
The catalogs recount America’s past as seen through the lens of electronics geniuses. The eagle is depicted on the cover of the 1945 list, its outline of barracks, a fighter plane and a naval vessel. The 1965 catalog looks like a sci-fi pulp cover and shows a rocket blasting through space surrounded by strange planets. The 2002 catalog is full of barcodes designed to work with CueCats, a brief technological fad that had people plugging a cat-shaped barcode scanner into their PCs.
RadioShack Catalogs also has a YouTube channel that hosts 273 different videos that make up the store’s video collection. There are training videos, commercials, internal sales demonstrations, and markets for long-forgotten devices. Did you know that RadioShack had a theme song in the 1980s? Now you can hear it.
There are also internal documents detailing the company’s history, markets, and even reprints of “Answers” magazine. “Published in the 1980s, Tandy’s Answers Magazine was a glossy magazine produced by the Tandy Corporation for information on its home and business computer brands,” the site explains.
Checking out the world’s RadioShack information is not a cheap or easy task and the site owner wants help. “The process of carefully dissecting, hand-scanning, developing images, editing, and preparing each catalog page for online viewing is incredibly time-consuming. Additionally, there are ongoing costs involved in acquiring new publications, conducting research, maintaining web hosting, and covering other web-related costs to keep this site running,” the site says, next to a button where people can donate to help cover their costs. .
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