Tandy, Radio-Shack catalogues and history

[cooperman]

Interesting site

https://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/i...#main_catalogs

[Roger Ramjet]

Thanks..... That's fantastic Cooperman.

How my heart aches for a time machine.

Rog

[tritone]

Nice one,

Thanks.

[Superscope]

It's a pity there isn't an archive for the Tandy (Uk) Catalogues!

There were some differences in what was available here.

Even so, what a fabulous resource!


Looking back through the Catalogues today, it strikes me, that stuff
was just a lot more interesting back then.






Ian

[chriswood1900]

Really loved the photo resources in the Radio Shack stores section of history, showing the development and social history over the years. Remarkable the similarity of development design and products with for example Maplin’s in the UK and the business implosion when it all goes wrong.
Link https://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/f.../h-stores.html

[The Philpott]

-Not only did stuff seem more interesting back in the day, i would add that from our perspective the shops were more interesting! Tandy in Chelmsford is now Monsoon, with Accessorize next door. My first DMM came from there, an own brand device which was solid on the outside but cheap on the inside. (A recent quote from the forum applies- something along the lines of a pig in a dress or a dog in a frock)

I see the price in 1993 was $36 rising to $40 the following year, staying at that level until cessation of production around 1998. During this period there was on average $1.6 USD to the £, and i think that this correlates to what i paid for it, ie somewhere in the £22 to £25 ballpark- not exactly cheap. I finally cracked it open to recalibrate it a couple of years ago, and had to choose between having a good 2VDC range or a good 20VDC range- but at least there are actual pots. in there! The original test leads are still good, albeit the banana plugs have been changed. The sliding on-off switch is fine, unexpectedly.

Dave

[SiriusHardware]

I too would like to see something similar for the UK Tandy catalogues because although the range of products was in general quite cross-Atlantic there were UK specific sections on, for example, CB radio where the models sold in the USA weren't suitable for the UK and vice-versa.

I have three Tandy catalogues, two from around 1979-1981 if anyone wants to start up a UK specific online archive of Tandy catalogues. I'm sure others will still have other issues hanging around.

I still have a few surviving Tandy items, A Realistic TRC-1001 handheld CB, A 6-channel stereo audio mixer (32-1210), some Archer hand tools, and a 'Micronta' logic probe which is still in good order although I had to shorten the cable slightly to eliminate a broken cable core about a year ago.

[TonyDuell]

I have quite a few UK Tandy catalogues on the bookshelf going back to around 1977. Probably not a complete set though. Maybe a few duplicates if anyone is going to be scanning them.

I have quite a bit of Tandy stuff around. Like SiriusHardware I have one of their logic probes. The case got somewhat melted when it fell against the spring of the Antex soldering iron stand I was using 40 years ago. But it still works. I only stopped using it because I bought a LogicDart. I also have the companion Micronta logic pulser. And I bought one of their DMMs second-hand some years back. It's autoranging but still uses the well-known 7106 chip with a lot of 4000-series CMOS logic for the autoranging. Fortuntely there's a circuit diagram in the user manual. I am pretty sure I still have a Radio Shack 'tube tester'. American, so 115V mains only, it's a simple emissions tester.

Some other bits around, at least one pocket radio, personal cassette player, personal CD player, etc.

And of course I have my TRS-80 collection -- Model 1 (my first 'real' computer), Model 3, Model 4, Color Computer 2, Color Computer 3. Model 100, and some of their pocket computers (rebadged Sharp and Casio).

[Paul Stenning]

If anyone does scan some UK ones I'd be happy to host them on https://www.vintage-radio.info/ where they can be freely downloaded.

[agardiner]

Thanks for posting!

I too would love to see the Tandy ones.

[Superscope]

Originally Posted by Paul Stenning

If anyone does scan some UK ones I'd be happy to host them on https://www.vintage-radio.info/ where they can be freely downloaded.

Thanks Paul, that's a very generous offer.

I was trying to decide whether I wanted to get involved in another Mammoth Forum Project
after the Avo Multimeter Survey, but since there seems to be quite a bit of interest in this,

Maybe we could start with getting a list together of which Catalogues are available amongst
Forum members for Scanning., before worrying about who will actually Scan them.

There has to be the assumption of course, that the act of scanning will destroy the catalogue
in it's retail condition, so submissions of catalogues would need to take this into account.
Although, I think it would be possible to Scan an intact Catalogue with just minor Spine wear.

If anybody has Tandy Catalogues available for this project, maybe they could post the Years
here, or PM me and I will keep a list.

I believe Tandy opened their first store in the Uk in 1973, so I guess that was the first Uk Catalogue.

Of course, the dreaded copyright will need to be researched, and I'm not sure who owns
that, but I think it might be "Car Phone Warehouse" who I think bought out Tandy Uk from Radio Shack
when they started winding down.



Ian

[Paul Stenning]

I have one of these scanners https://www.amazon.co.uk/Plustek-Opt.../dp/B005AHBGZ6 which is more suited for scanning books and publications with glued spines that can't be folded flat. Folding to 90 degrees can cause some spine damage still, but not too serious.

However it does lose around 5mm at the bound edge which can be a problem depending on the page layout (I scanned BVWS Bulletins for the website using it and where there are photos or diagrams spanning a pair of pages there is a small part missing in the middle).

Regarding copyright, the Tandy brand name is now owned by a company in Oxford https://www.tandyonline.com/customer-service however it is unlikely that they would bother pursuing it as there is no financial or business benefit in doing so.

They have scans of two old catalogues on their website https://www.tandyonline.com/catalogues so if contacted appropriately they may well acknowledge what we are doing and understand the interest.

[Aub]

Lots of fond memories of Tandy and Maplin, to a lesser extent but, at the time, lots of electronics hobbyists regularly slated them for being too expensive compared with firms you could order stuff from via post.

Cheers

Aub

[SiriusHardware]

Well, one of the problems was that they didn't sell small components like resistors in singles, but rather in packs, so if your project only called for 1 x 6K8 resistor, 1 x 18K resistor and 1 x 82K resistor and you couldn't buy less than 10 that soon mounted up.

What was great about them was that when you bought a chip it invariably came in a bubble pack with the data sheet neatly folded up in the back.

They also used to sell bubble packs of mixed / miscellaneous RF inductors which were a godsend in my earliest days of mucking about with homebrew radio receivers and transmitters.

[SiriusHardware]

If we were to attempt to scan the ones we have would it help if there was an agreed standard format (I would assume PDF with one catalogue page per PDF page), and DPI resolution and so on, or does that not matter?

[Superscope]

I think Pdf definitely makes the most sense for the Finished Catalogue,
as everybody has access to a pdf reader if they want one.

The Scanned images would probably have to be Jpeg, PNG or Tiff, depending on what Scanning software is used.

I have Adobe Acrobat (Older Version, but still does the Job), so I can compile multiple
Jpegs (or Pdf's) into single Pdf files if required.

Scanning I think would be useful at 600 dpi, since if the effort is made to Scan Hundreds of
Pages, might as well make them High Res so they are there if needed.

Although the Published Catalogues would probably need to be lowered in Resolution,
otherwise the File Sizes could easily be Hundreds of Mb.
Lets see.


Ian

[Superscope]

For information,

I have messaged "TandyonLine" today regarding Copyright. and an
overview of what we would like to do.


Let's see what they say.

It can only go One of Two ways!



Actually, it could go a third way, if they don't own the Copyright of course.


Ian

[The Philpott]

-There is a fourth- they ignore you. (which can be quite useful..)

Dave

[Paul Stenning]

300DPI is high enough to be clearly readable and results in much smaller files than 600DPI. The recently added BVWS bulletins such as this https://www.bvws.org.uk/publications...letin_37_1.pdf are scanned at 200DPI for the colour and greyscale pages, and 300DPI for the bitmap/monochrome, which is fine for on-screen reading while keeping the file size down, but not really enough for printing.

Lower resolution is also faster with most scanners.

My approach is to scan to lossless image files (TIFF or PNG), do any tidying and cropping etc in Photoshop Elements, then import into PDF-XChange Editor for final PDF creation and optionally OCR. JPEG should be avoided for interim files as it is lossy.

[Superscope]

So, as a first step, in order to get this Project off the ground, does anybody have any
Tandy Catalogues they are willing to donate?

I will put a request out in the Wanted section as well, but it would be good to record what is
potentially going to be available in this thread.



Ian