Vintage Radio Shack Catalogs- LIVE ONLINE!

[VernGraner]

Coming on the heels of the complete Popular Science library being made available online, now I find that some very dedicated (and maybe slightly crazy - in a good way ) person has taken the time and trouble to digitize all the printed Radio Shack catalogs they can find and make them available online here:

http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com

WOW! 1979 catalog with MACH-1 Speakers!! Man this is fun and nostalgic!

Vern

[CeaSaR]

WOW! 1979 catalog with MACH-1 Speakers!!

Drool... Slobber... WAAAHHHH!!!! MACH-1'S!!!!!!!!!!!!



CeaSaR

[Bob Scott]

Wow. Right there in the Jan '50 Popular Science is a lot of interesting stuff, and nostalgic ads for things like "Audel's" car repair books and dozens of tech schools that are long gone.

I see an article for diluting heavy grease with liquid carbon tetrachloride to make it easier to lubricate door hinges. Carbon tet was used every day as THE cleaning fluid by dry cleaners. It has been illegal to obtain since ~1969.

There is an electronics project using 2 6L6 power tubes as a power oscillator and a bridge rectifier made out of selenium rectifiers (SR1, SR2, etc), long obsolete technology. The circuit allows you to run your fixed speed 78 RPM record player's AC motor on lower frequencies for playing 33 and 45 RPM records. HAha. This is all fascinating stuff, and the magazine is way bigger than the ones they sell these days.

..and the "new" inventions for Jan ,50. Some of them made it and are still in use. Some of them didn't.

This is gonna take a while........

[Janitor Tzap]

Darn it Vern!

You would have to come across a great site for wasting time looking at!

Oh well......
I've still got test equipment that I purchased from Radio Shack that I still use.
Even if they no longer carry them.

The first computer that I actually owned was a Tandy 1000 model I, that was the store demo.
That I got for some $650.00 with the base memory of 128K and one 360k Floppy drive.
By the time I passed it on to my sister.
I had put a second 360K Floppy in, a 40Meg Hard card, 512K Memory Expansion Card, NEC V30 Processor,
RS-232 Serial Port board with two ports, Serial mouse, 14.4 US Robotic Modem, and a Kraft Joystick.

I would of held onto it longer.
But, I couldn't find 1 or 2 meg Memory Expansion Cards that would fit it.
Plus, when the 286 Processors came out, that pretty much clinched it for me too upgrade to a newer computer.


Signed: Janitor Tzap

[Dean Huster]

I find that a lot of the PS predictions for the future didn't happen, e.g., practical flying cars for the common man and moon or Martian colonies. I don't think they had a glimmer of the direction that communications took. They didn't visualize that 50 years into the future there'd be laptop computers magnitudes more powerful than the then current IBM 360 mainframe, home printers that would output faster than the big mainframe chain printers, gigabytes of RAM on fingernail-sized chips, terabyte hard drives that fit into one's palm, sat phones, MRI, CT, pill-size cameras that patients could swallow (even "Fantastic Voyage" had yet to me made into a movie), practical eradication of polio and smallpox, cars that are more electronic than mechanical, cellular phones (with texting, video, Internet access, cameras), blazing home video games, CDs, DVDs, the Internet, multi-GHz real-time oscilloscopes, GPS and Magellans, commonly obese schoolkids, 3-point basket ball goals with shot clocks and toggled jump balls and on and on ..... and idiot audiophools who still think that vacuum tube electronics deliver audio true to the original.

Hey, I'm here and now and still amazed at a 2GB SD card.

[Bob Scott]

Coming on the heels of the complete Popular Science library being made available online

Vern, where did you find this URL? I mean how did you find out about it or find it in the first place? I can't seem to get to this specific list of all of the PSMs of the last 139 years any other way than the specific URL above.

Hmm. Lesee. If I read one issue a day, It will take 4.5 years to read all of them. (They are large compared to the newer PS issues, 200+ pages.)

I just wonder, is it an industry secret? I'd like to conjure up similar URLs for N&V, RE, PE, EN and the very old EI (ELectronics Illustrated).

[dr_when]

Vern,

What a great find!!! Since I was a teenager in the 70's I always looked forward to the latest Radio Shack catalog and actually wore them out in the course of a year lookin' at all the equipment. The site you found was a trip through the past as I paged through each of the catalogs.

I could fairly well tell which catalogs contained which devices even after all these years. Really love the computer catalogs with all the Trash-80's, all of which I had owned at one time or another from the Model I up through the COCO and IBM clones.

[Bob Scott]

I searched www.books.google.com for any magazine with "electronics". There were none, but they also have all of the issues of Popular Mechanics ever printed.