[Coco] A bit more of CoCo history dies...

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 05 August 2009, Roger Taylor wrote:
>At 06:47 PM 8/4/2009, you wrote:
>>"The Shack" re-branding
>>
>>RadioShack is in the process of re-branding the company as "The
>>Shack" as well as re-building corporate culture. This will be kicked
>>off by a launch celebration in both San Francisco and New York
>>featuring "14 foot tall laptops" streaming the images from their
>>webcams from one city to the other, live music in both locations, as
>>well as television coverage of the event.[14] The event will take
>>place in Times Square and Justin Herman Plaza on August 6-8, 2009,
>>starting each morning at 6AM Eastern and lasting until Midnight. To
>>help promote the rebranding internally, employees were given
>>T-shirts, travel mugs, and EGrips, all branded with the new "The
>>Shack" logo. These internal promotional items were bundled with a 5
>>minute long, highly stylized and edited video with an introduction
>>from the CEO explaining what "The Shack" is.
>>
>>Tandy is gone and so is Radio Shack in a few days.
>>
>>Yes, some of called the stores "the shack" in the past, but the
>>press and public will new start calling them "The Shaft" for how you
>>feel when you walk out of their stores.
>
>The rebranding is nothing but a last gasp from a failed business
>model that has persisted while other businesses change with U.S.
>culture.  The shack has stuck with what used to work for them and it
>took them WAY too long to figure out "it ain't really working".  When
>they ditch the electronic hobbyist items, it'll be a sad day, but
>then that's life.
>
>Also, this is the most intimidating store I've had to shop in.  Even
>Wal-Marts faulty security poles we have to deal with today doesn't
>compare to the experience I feel when I walk into a shack just trying
>to round up a few electronic components.  There's no peaceful
>shopping in a shack.  So I try my best to not go anymore.

I would hope that the person claiming to be a shack shill, is faithfully 
reading this, and will take some of our opinions back to someplace it might 
have an effect.  Besides the other squawks in this thread, and the fact that 
I'm an opinionated old fart AND a broadcast engineer, not to mention a C.E.T., 
rant mode is ON:

Hear me, Mr. Shack shill, closely:  The old radio shack that had a good 
hobbiest selection of electronic parts was usually our first line of defense 
for keeping small town America radio and yes, tv stations too, on the air, cuz 
we could, if we were smart enough, generally cobble something together to 
replace our broken whatsis and whichamigidguits.  Slowly that has gone away 
over the last 15 years, largely because you, Radio Shack, has lost sight of 
the original mission, which we think was intended to intro the people who were 
curious enough to want to learn, something about how electronics thingies 
worked, and make some money doing it.  You had the parts we needed to not only 
experiment and learn, but to fix that which broke.  That was 25 years ago.

Then you thought you make some money with this newfangled thing called a 
computer, so at the beginning you didn't want to risk much, so you gave us a 
z80 based Model 1, which sold for $799 when it was first shipped.  It sold 
just enough at that sky high price to show you there was a potential market, 
so you went looking for something a bit lower priced, and came up with the 4k 
color computer for a couple hundred less.  As for the beloved 'coco' the rest 
is all old history to _this_ group.  Then came a series of less than stellar 
stuff based on the intel cpu's, all so cheaply built they couldn't run any 
applications or games but yours.  Now deader than a dodo of course.  All along 
the line you treated anything electronic as something to squeeze every dollar 
you could out of the production costs, regardless of how badly it was crippled 
by so doing.  CRT's in your monitors were half the number of dots per linear 
inch the competition was selling for 50 bucks less for instance, so using one 
of them was eye straining at best, and unusable much of the time.  For an 
example, the CM8, sold for CoCo3's, only had enough resolution to be usable at 
a width 40 screen because text was unreadable at width 80.  Why do you think 
that back then, phillips/maggy was selling an 8CM515 for 100 bucks more, and 4 
out of 5 of them were going to Coco3 users?

Then the amiga hit the tv stations, and we kept phillips/maggy in business for 
much of a decade, making decent rgb driveable, ntsc scan rate monitors 
including their 8cm135.  For several years, the fancy graphics you saw on tv 
was all generated, sometimes in real time, by one of the better amigas.  Those 
graphics were in large part possible because we had monitors good enough to 
show us the mistakes. You could have had 90% of that business if you would 
have used the same razor sharp crt in yours.

Now your thing is cell phones and digital cameras.  I wouldn't touch one of 
your cell phones because of the contract language, and the digital camera 
selection is from the decidedly low end of the line stuff.  No one at the 
shack today has a clue as to whether or not I can plug in a usb cable, mount 
it as a disk drive, and copy the pix off to my computer for printing like I 
can right now with my aged Olympus C3020.  No one manning your stores even has 
a clue what I'm talking about.  Stock answer is that you've got this photo 
printer for sale, only $300 by the time I get all the supplies for it.  Guess 
what?  Its a toy! I don't do very many of that size, which I can do 4 up on a 
sheet, but if its worth printing, I do a full borderless 8.5x11.  And I 
probably do them in higher color fidelity, not to mention with full 100 year 
archival dyes, than your gizmo, for about $2 a print including my time.  On an 
old, 4 color, epson C82.  That thing is amazing.  I have sold prints of 
weddings, several times, and I just went as a guest.

I could go on, but the examples I've mentioned are symptomatic of poor 
management decisions for the last 25 years.  Had you jumped on the m68k 
bandwagon and given us another, better amiga, the world might just not be so 
ruled by wintel cpu's with largely broken architectures that are now demanded 
because of the legacy software out there that wouldn't have a clue what to do 
if it suddenly didn't have to work around the broken intel design from the 
gitgo.  Heck, I would have thought you would have learned from the z80 
debacle.  My mistake.  There are lots of far better cpu architectures out 
there than intel and its clones.  How about the arm cpu that can run at 200mhz 
using 1/4 watt of power?  Or the 500 mhz version that runs on 2 watts?  Both 
run linux natively.  But because that's (wintel crap) what I can get, that's 
what I'm running here, an AMD quad core phenom 9550 at 2.1Ghz, burns 65 watts 
sleeping, and 4Gb of ram is almost enough to make it do what I want to do, 
which, come to think of it, is everything.

Oh, and tell your money folks that when I have $20K in the bank (which I 
generally do in my checking account, I've written checks for the last 3 
vehicles I've purchased), and I've been a presence in your stores as a 
customer for 20 years in the same 2 stores, I am not about to go home and get 
a birth certificate so I have 2 bits of identity on me when I want to buy $50 
worth of stuff and pay by check.  You just pi$$ed in my cherrios with that bit 
of nonsense.

/rant.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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