
A Different Eulogy for RadioShack - JohnMunsch
http://johnmunsch.com/2014/11/30/a-very-different-eulogy-for-radioshack/
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guylhem
As a kid, I had the pleasure of playing with Deskmate sound and Deskmate
music, on a Tandy 286 with no harddrive - only a floppy.

It worked quite well, and I remember taking sample of various thingies and
making music.

I also did as the article says - putting the samples on the sonatina because
it was quite funny.

That should have been the star feature of the computer. Too bad the sales team
didn't focus on that.

(I wonder if someday I'll be able to play back these tracks that I must have
saved somewhere?)

EDIT: correction from the article: they seem to have used the mouse
controller, not the joystick controller, cf the project manager post on
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sys.tandy/fq1OO44...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sys.tandy/fq1OO44yLtI/SAbXFWdZOB0J)
and further interesting technical details

~~~
JohnMunsch
That is a really great link there. Thank you for that.

~~~
giggitytex
What are you up to these days?

~~~
JohnMunsch
Still programming 27 years after I started. I'm lead of a group of front-end
developers using AngularJS to build an online marketplace for hospitals to
purchase their supplies.

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untog
The original eulogy is here:

[http://www.sbnation.com/2014/11/26/7281129/radioshack-
eulogy...](http://www.sbnation.com/2014/11/26/7281129/radioshack-eulogy-
stories)

By all accounts they're talking about different eras - this one ending in
1992, and the original starting in 2004. As such, they could probably both be
perfectly valid.

~~~
ams6110
And one is about the Tandy corporation and their PC projects, the other is
about working retail in a Radio Shack store. VERY easy to see that there could
be wildly different perceptionns there. And I do recall a time in the mid/late
1980s when Tandy PCs were among some of the better PC clones of the day.

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InclinedPlane
It's always worth remembering that corporations especially are subject to the
ship of theseus paradox. Quite simply, the RadioShack of the mid '90s and
later was fundamentally a different entity than the RadioShack of the '70s and
'80s. One was an organization of intelligent and technologically ambitious
folks that was plugged into the heart of the personal computing revolution.
The other was a typical soulless, rudderless corporation with no purpose and
no ambition other than the bottom line and no intellect or intelligence other
than the basest avaricious instincts; an entity that abused its employees and
customers to every extent possible in the pursuit of profit. In between, the
folks who were part of the first RadioShack left, either retired or moved on,
and were replaced with the folks who established the principles of the 2nd,
somewhere along the line the culture and ideals of the first company fell by
the wayside, never to be picked up again. Too many failed projects here and
there, too little listening to what people "on the ground" were telling the
leadership (about bad projects and bad policies). When a company becomes a bad
place to work the process typically accelerates very rapidly. The most
talented folks often find it easiest to find work elsewhere and take the
greatest insult from being forced to work on crappy projects and not having
their criticisms borne of extensive expertise heard. Once they leave the
company then finds it even more difficult to execute on projects, because they
lack key talent, and the work environment is now worse for everyone else
because the best people have left (working alongside high-caliber individuals
is an important goal for most engineers), which drives more people to leave,
and again it's typically the folks who have the easiest time of finding work
elsewhere. Quickly the talent evaporates out of the company, and things go
downhill from there.

It wouldn't be the first time, or even the millionth or billionth, that an
organization (company, country, family, estate, etc.) fell from grace in such
a fashion, but it's always sad to see it happen.

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softdev12
I always loved RS when growing up. The problem they solved for me was simple.
I needed a cable or other small esoteric part. They had it. I could get it
that day and get to work.

The issue is they charged $20 for a cable that you could now buy from Amazon
for $1. I know people who would buy the cable from RS for $20, order it on
Amazon, wait the 7-9 days for it arrive. Then return the $20 cable to $RS.

Basically, their core purpose disappeared. Amazon has killed them much the
same way they killed Border's.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> Amazon has killed them much the same way they killed Border's.

What's stopped Amazon from killing Barnes and Noble?

~~~
rhino369
It almost did. It on this quarter turned a profit, the first since 2010. And
it is surviving by diversifying from books. It's also the last remaining
national book retailer.

