RadioShack (formerly written as Radio Shack) is an American electronics retailerfounded in 1921. It was initially established as an amateur radio mail-order business centered in Boston, Massachusetts. Its parent company, Radio Shack Corporation, was purchased by Tandy Corporation in 1962, shifting its focus from radio equipment to hobbyist electronic components. At its peak in 1999, Tandy operated over 8,000 RadioShack stores in the United States, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada.
By the mid-2000s, RadioShack was facing financial decline. In February 2015, after years of management crises, poor worker relations, diminished revenue, and 11 consecutive quarterly losses, RadioShack was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange and subsequently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.[3][4] In May 2015, the company's assets, including the RadioShack brand name and related intellectual property, were purchased by General Wireless, a subsidiary of Standard General, for US$26.2 million.[5]
In March 2017, General Wireless and subsidiaries filed for bankruptcy, claiming that a store-within-a-store partnership with Sprint was not as profitable as expected.[6] As a result, RadioShack shuttered several company-owned stores[7][8] and announced plans to shift its business primarily online.[9]
RadioShack was acquired by Retail Ecommerce Ventures, a holding company owned by Alex Mehr and self-help influencer Tai Lopez, in November 2020.[10] Currently, RadioShack operates primarily as an e-commerce website with a network of independently owned and franchised RadioShack stores, as well as a supplier of parts for HobbyTown USA.[11] On March 2, 2023, Retail Ecommerce Ventures announced that it was mulling a possible bankruptcy filing.[12] In May 2023 RadioShack was purchased by Unicomer Group, a company based in El Salvador. Unicomer Group is one of the largest franchisors of RadioShack with stores based in El Salvador, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.
In 1977, two years after the MITS Altair 8800, Radio Shack introduced the TRS-80, one of the first mass-produced personal computers.[57] This was a complete pre-assembled system at a time when many microcomputers were built from kits, backed by a nationwide retail chain when computer stores were in their infancy. Sales of the initial, primitive US$600 (equal to $2,898 today) TRS-80 exceeded all expectations despite its limited capabilities and high price.[58] This was followed by the TRS-80 Color Computer in 1980, designed to attach to a television. Tandy also inspired the Tandy Computer Whiz Kids (1982–1991), a comic-book duo of teen calculator enthusiasts who teamed up with the likes of Archie and Superman.[59] Radio Shack's computer stores offered lessons to pre-teens as "Radio Shack Computer Camp" in the early 1980s.[60]
By September 1982, the company had more than 4,300 stores, and more than 2,000 independent franchises in towns not large enough for a company-owned store. The latter also sold third-party hardware and software for Tandy computers, but company-owned stores did not sell or even acknowledge the existence of non-Tandy products.[61] In the mid-1980s, Radio Shack began a transition from its proprietary 8-bit computers to its proprietary IBM PC compatible Tandy computers, removing the "Radio Shack" name from the product in an attempt to shake off the long-running nicknames "Radio Scrap"[62] and "Trash 80"[63] to make the product appeal to business users. Poor compatibility, shrinking margins and a lack of economies of scale led Radio Shack to exit the computer-manufacturing market in the 1990s after losing much of the desktop PC market to newer, price-competitive rivals like Dell.[40] Tandy acquired the Computer City chain in 1991, and sold the stores to CompUSA in 1998.
In 1994, RadioShack began selling IBM's Aptiva line of home computers.[64] This partnership would last until 1998, when RadioShack partnered with Compaq and created 'The Creative Learning Center' as a store-within-a-store to promote desktop PCs.[65] Similar promotions were tried with 'The Sprint Store at RadioShack' (mobile telephones), 'RCA Digital Entertainment Center' (home audio and video products), and 'PowerZone' (RadioShack's line of battery products, power supplies, and surge protectors).[
The RadioShack TRS-80 Color Computer, later marketed as the Tandy Color Computer and sometimes nicknamed the CoCo, is a line of home computers developed and sold by Tandy Corporation. Despite sharing a name with the earlier TRS-80, the Color Computer is a completely different, incompatible system and a radical departure in design and compatibility with its Motorola 6809E processor rather than the Zilog Z80earlier models were built around.[1]
The Tandy Color Computer line started in 1980 with what is now called the Color Computer 1. It was followed by the Color Computer 2 in 1983, then the Color Computer 3 in 1986. All three models maintain a high level of software and hardware compatibility, with few programs written for an older model being unable to run on the newer ones. The Color Computer 3 was discontinued in 1991.
All Color Computer models shipped with Color BASIC, an implementation of Microsoft BASIC, in ROM. Variants of the OS-9 multitasking operating system were available from third parties.
No comments:
Post a Comment