When RadioShack filed for bankruptcy as expected last week, the geeks came out to reminisce.
I read a raft of comments from those who said they spent hours of their childhood in the stores or ran to the Shack for an emergency capacitor or resistor to keep the electronic project they were working on afloat.
RadioShack played an important role in the personal computer revolution. Its TRS-80 rolled into the stores in 1977 and was one of the earliest mass-produced personal computers, according to Wikipedia.
The TRS-100 came out in 1983 and was one of the first notebook-style computers. It was about the size of a book, weighed a little over 3 pounds and had a screen that showed eight lines of text. The newspaper I worked for bought one for reporters to use on assignment.
Eight-bit, 2.4 MHz processor, 32 kB of memory, a built-in 300 baud modem, parallel printer port, serial communication port and bar-code reader input. A cassette audio tape could be used for storage. Oh joy! It ran on 4 AA batteries and cost more than $1,000. RadioShack sold more than 6 million of them, and they became the go-to piece of equipment for reporters in the field.
So, goodbye, RadioShack. Depending on how the bankruptcy plays out, you may be heading off soon to join Atari and Commodore and Sinclair.
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For the seriously geeky. ABC has picked up a reimagined take of BattleBots, the killer robot combat sport, 12 years after it ended its run on Comedy Central, according to Deadline. Like the original, the new series to run this summer will feature homemade robots battling against each other in a single-elimination tournament until there is one champion.
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Don’t call me common. After months of battling, the FCC last week announced that it would assure net neutrality by reclassifying Internet service providers, including wireless phone data providers, as utilities, or “common carriers.”
The FCC had ruled more than a decade ago that ISPs were “information services,” seriously weakening the agency’s ability to regulate them and enforce net neutrality — the idea that all Internet users are treated equally and there are no “fast lanes” for those that can pay more.
Obviously, the wireless companies oppose more regulation, and there is a movement afoot in Congress to block the FCC. The full FCC votes on the policy on Feb. 26.
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Scan, scan, scan your book. Amazon has debuted Kindle Convert, a program for Windows only that turns print books into digital versions fully compatible with Amazon’s Kindle software, according to TechCrunch. The software download costs $49 (currently on sale for $19), but there is a bigger price to pay.
You’ll have to scan them using a standard flatbed or other type of computer scanner, which means doing two pages at a time at most, TechCrunch reports. Got a couple of months with nothing to do to convert your library?
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First Published: February 10, 2015, 5:00 a.m.
