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Vintage RadioShack
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When Britt Daniel of the Austin, Texas, indie rock band Spoon released a song called "Don't Buy the Realistic" in 1996, fans still knew what he was talking about. Realistic was the much-maligned home-electronics brand of RadioShack, which was...
When Britt Daniel of the Austin, Texas, indie rock band Spoon released a song called "Don't Buy the Realistic" in 1996, fans still knew what he was talking about. Realistic was the much-maligned home-electronics brand of RadioShack, which was founded as Radio Hut in 1921 by a pair of Boston brothers named Milton and Theodore Deutschmann. From 1954 until 2000, the Realistic name graced everything Radio Shack (it was two words until the year 2000) made, from record players to CB radios. For the most part, Realistic products were not well thought of by audiophiles, although their low price point guaranteed the company generations of customers. Indeed, in that Spoon song, you can hear someone in the background yelling "I got it at RadioShack for $37," which was not so much a brag about getting a good deal as it was a statement of how cheap, and perhaps cheaply made, Realistic products were.
The genesis for Realistic was the 1954 Realist amplifier and Realist FM receiver, the first of which was manufactured for the company by Grommes, the second by Harmon Kardon, which had been founded in 1953, only one year earlier. After a lawsuit from a camera company of the same name, Realist was changed to Realistic in 1955. Equally speedy was RadioShack's decision in 1956 to manufacture its electronic components in Japan, which had yet to earn the reputation for quality electronics that it enjoys today.
Until 1954, RadioShack had been a retailer of other manufacturers' products, whether they were Raytheon voltage stabilizers, RCA radio tubes, or transformers made by a variety of companies. Even as it was adding its own branded consumer line, RadioShack's target audience was still people making and repairing ham radios and other electronic devices. In that capacity, the company may have felt no need to expand beyond its single Boston location, but by 1961, RadioShack had two locations in Massachusetts and a pair in Connecticut. The company's expansion, though, both in terms of its real-estate decisions and the breadth of the products in its 300-plus-page catalogs, was spreading RadioShack very thin. By 1963, the struggling retailer was purchased for just $300,000 by a leather-goods retailer named Tandy, whose customers were also hobbyists, albeit of a different sort than RadioShack's. Weirdly, though, the marriage worked—by 1969, RadioShack had grown from four to 500 stores nationwide.
Throughout the 1970s, RadioShack products included its TRC-model CB radios and Navaho-model base stations, 8-track and cassette decks, a line of speakers called the Mach series, calculators, its colorful transistor Flavoradios, and even batteries, which it sold at a steep discount compared to nationally marketed brands. But the 1970s, specifically 1977, was also when RadioShack entered the computer sweepstakes when it introduced the TRS-80. Its main competitors at the time were Commodore and Apple, but briefly RadioShack was the top dog of the personal-computer world. By 1981, none other than acclaimed science-fiction author Issac Asimov was appearing in ads for RadioShack to promote the TRS-80 II.
Continue readingWhen Britt Daniel of the Austin, Texas, indie rock band Spoon released a song called "Don't Buy the Realistic" in 1996, fans still knew what he was talking about. Realistic was the much-maligned home-electronics brand of RadioShack, which was founded as Radio Hut in 1921 by a pair of Boston brothers named Milton and Theodore Deutschmann. From 1954 until 2000, the Realistic name graced everything Radio Shack (it was two words until the year 2000) made, from record players to CB radios. For the most part, Realistic products were not well thought of by audiophiles, although their low price point guaranteed the company generations of customers. Indeed, in that Spoon song, you can hear someone in the background yelling "I got it at RadioShack for $37," which was not so much a brag about getting a good deal as it was a statement of how cheap, and perhaps cheaply made, Realistic products were.
The genesis for Realistic was the 1954 Realist amplifier and Realist FM receiver, the first of which was manufactured for the company by Grommes, the second by Harmon Kardon, which had been founded in 1953, only one year earlier. After a lawsuit from a camera company of the same name, Realist was changed to Realistic in 1955. Equally speedy was RadioShack's decision in 1956 to manufacture its electronic components in Japan, which had yet to earn the reputation for quality electronics that it enjoys today.
Until 1954, RadioShack had been a retailer of other manufacturers' products, whether they were Raytheon voltage stabilizers, RCA radio tubes, or transformers made by a variety of companies. Even as it was adding its own branded consumer line, RadioShack's target audience was still people making and repairing ham radios and other electronic devices. In that capacity, the company may have felt no need to expand beyond its single Boston location, but by 1961, RadioShack had two locations in Massachusetts and a pair in Connecticut. The company's expansion, though, both in...
When Britt Daniel of the Austin, Texas, indie rock band Spoon released a song called "Don't Buy the Realistic" in 1996, fans still knew what he was talking about. Realistic was the much-maligned home-electronics brand of RadioShack, which was founded as Radio Hut in 1921 by a pair of Boston brothers named Milton and Theodore Deutschmann. From 1954 until 2000, the Realistic name graced everything Radio Shack (it was two words until the year 2000) made, from record players to CB radios. For the most part, Realistic products were not well thought of by audiophiles, although their low price point guaranteed the company generations of customers. Indeed, in that Spoon song, you can hear someone in the background yelling "I got it at RadioShack for $37," which was not so much a brag about getting a good deal as it was a statement of how cheap, and perhaps cheaply made, Realistic products were.
The genesis for Realistic was the 1954 Realist amplifier and Realist FM receiver, the first of which was manufactured for the company by Grommes, the second by Harmon Kardon, which had been founded in 1953, only one year earlier. After a lawsuit from a camera company of the same name, Realist was changed to Realistic in 1955. Equally speedy was RadioShack's decision in 1956 to manufacture its electronic components in Japan, which had yet to earn the reputation for quality electronics that it enjoys today.
Until 1954, RadioShack had been a retailer of other manufacturers' products, whether they were Raytheon voltage stabilizers, RCA radio tubes, or transformers made by a variety of companies. Even as it was adding its own branded consumer line, RadioShack's target audience was still people making and repairing ham radios and other electronic devices. In that capacity, the company may have felt no need to expand beyond its single Boston location, but by 1961, RadioShack had two locations in Massachusetts and a pair in Connecticut. The company's expansion, though, both in terms of its real-estate decisions and the breadth of the products in its 300-plus-page catalogs, was spreading RadioShack very thin. By 1963, the struggling retailer was purchased for just $300,000 by a leather-goods retailer named Tandy, whose customers were also hobbyists, albeit of a different sort than RadioShack's. Weirdly, though, the marriage worked—by 1969, RadioShack had grown from four to 500 stores nationwide.
Throughout the 1970s, RadioShack products included its TRC-model CB radios and Navaho-model base stations, 8-track and cassette decks, a line of speakers called the Mach series, calculators, its colorful transistor Flavoradios, and even batteries, which it sold at a steep discount compared to nationally marketed brands. But the 1970s, specifically 1977, was also when RadioShack entered the computer sweepstakes when it introduced the TRS-80. Its main competitors at the time were Commodore and Apple, but briefly RadioShack was the top dog of the personal-computer world. By 1981, none other than acclaimed science-fiction author Issac Asimov was appearing in ads for RadioShack to promote the TRS-80 II.
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