Polycom’s co-founder on the best investment he ever made

I'm sad to see Radio Shack so far from the "builders" market.

I had to run to RS this weekend to try to find a part, only to find 3 salespeople who had no idea of how components or soldering worked. They seemed amazed that I would actually design my own circuits, while I look at what I am doing and consider it to be a bit amateurish. :(

we have an original polycom soundstation on our conference table. it still works fine.

I think the remaining ones are just cell phone and battery kiosks that happen to be full sized stores.

Up until a couple years ago, the two near me had full sections dedicated to discrete components, arduinos, etc. The old school Radio Shacks had all that stuff for decades until the internet killed them. Now its just a retail junk store.

> They seemed amazed that I would actually design my own circuits

Well, you're dealing with people with retail jobs. They probably aren't meeting a lot of engineers or makers. They spend their days arguing with housewives and children over cell phone contracts and fees.

In Canada, Bell purchased Radio Shack and rebranded it. It has pretty aggressive cell phone upselling, and we missed out on the arduino/makerspace stuff that the US Radio Shack was embarking on a few years ago.

The quote about Woz using a TRS-80 for phone phreaking is a misquote of the referenced Wireless article. I'm sure the "one" that Woz bought was a touch tone dialer, not a TRS-80.

Read about the biggest tech stories of the 20th century, and RadioShack keeps popping up: Long before he founded Netscape, Marc Andreessen learned to program tooling around on a TRS-80, one of the first affordable personal computers and one of the first devices RadioShack ever produced. Kevin Mitnick, the first hacker ever on the FBI’s most-wanted list, learned his trade on the demo models at RadioShack because he couldn’t afford a computer of his own. John Draper, the phone phreaker known as “Captain Crunch,” hacked his way into free long-distance calls using a Touch Tone dialer he bought from RadioShack.

Woz bought one too, and he says it cost him a fortune. He used it for the now-infamous Blue Box, which he and Steve Jobs used to make their own free calls without interference from Ma Bell. Without RadioShack, there’s no Blue Box. And as Woz tells it, without the Blue Box there’s no Apple.