[sdiy] Radio Shack catalogs

[Richard Wentk]

I first encountered Rat Shack on a trip to the West Coast of the US in - I think - 1977. When I was 14.

I took a catalogue home with me, and spent days marvelling at the gaudy brainless stupidity of the hard sell and the sledge-hammer to the face marketing. 

It's truly a pleasure to renew my acquiantance with Flavoradios [tm] and badly drawn pictures of 70s people having ecstatic fits of arm-waving transport while using cheap consumer electronics.

On 12 May 2010, at 23:17, Paul Schreiber wrote:

> Every item (and I do mean EVERY item) that was in a RS store was approved by a single person: Bernie Appel. If Bernie sais no, it was NO and end of discussion (he like to refer to them as "my stores"). And, the average gross profit margin in a RS store was 56 points. This is about 4 TIMES what a high-end retail store like Nordstrums gets. High-volume retail stores get around 4 points. The average of the Fortune 500 WITHOUT Intel and Microsoft is like 8 points (these 2 skew it up a bit, they get around 26 points). In order to get 56 points (and I think in 1983 they hit like 63 points) you have to mark things up 5 or 6 TIMES the cost (it's not 1.58 times the cost).

This total fails to surprise me. Rat Shack always looked like exponents of rip-off corporatism at its most craven and idiotic. 

Occasionally something interesting fell out of the machine, but most of their products seemed to be somewhere between really quite boring and brain-clutchingly bad.

> #2 - a combination of arrogance and stupidity

That too. 

> b) we hired an engineer from Texas Instruments that was recently laid off (oh boy). He was in charge of a cost-reduced CPU card for out Model 3 computer (moving to the Model 4 which was the newer low-cost version). He did the schematic and because to time we didn't have a CDR, they went straight to pcb. When the boards came back, it was totally dead. He spent like 2 weeks of 18hr days until we formed an "at your bench" review, where someone asked "where are you buss buffers" and he replied "I took them all out to save cost" to which we replied "Errr...how do you separate the memory access from the video RAM accesses" and there was silence.
> 
> c) I designed a video graphics card (pre VGA ICs) that used a lot of 74Sxxx logic and very fast DRAMS. The DRAMS had critical drive current and waveform compliance specs and had terminated lines. This was to be a 6-layer pc board, the FIRST one every at Tandy (they were having kittens over it). I spent HOURS writing a detailed parts placement document for the CAD guys, with detailed descriptions about trace length, width and such. I left nothing to chance.
> 
> I got back the prototype boards (all nicely wavesoldered) and noticed all the DRAMS, instead of being in  1 long row close together, were randomly scattered all over the pc board. Of course th board failed the diagnostics (which I had running on wire-wrap). I stormed over to the CAD manager's office and he stated that their CAD tool had "minimized all the connections" and that "this was the preferred layout". I asked about my 12 page document and he said "we didn't have time to read it". So they had to pay a guy to lay it out BY HAND using Bishop tape on Mylar.

[Snicker]

Richard