How RadioShack Helped Build Silicon Valley

Steve Wozniak still laughs telling the story of the TV jammer. He’d built a tiny transmitter that he concealed in his hand, and he took it down into the basement of Libby Hall at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he was a freshman. Libby was where students would gather every night, around the only color television on campus. “I would jam the TV,” says Wozniak. “Then, a friend of mine would whack it, and it would go good. I would jam it again, fuzz up the picture. He’d whack the TV and it’d go good. Eventually, they stationed somebody next to that TV every night for weeks, and it was their job to fix the TV, adjust the tuning or whatever until it worked.”

Later, at school in Berkeley, he and Steve Jobs played more elaborate tricks: They’d convince their friends that the TV would only work if they pointed one arm pointed straight up, held a leg off the floor, or twisted their body into a pretzel. Once, Wozniak convinced his furious professors that another student was jamming all the TVs in their classroom by taking his finger off the transmitter right as the other guy left the room. “And the TAs pointed at him and said ‘there he goes.'”

When Woz first designed the jammer, the only part he had on hand was a tuning capacitor from an old transistor radio. So he went where he’d go whenever he needed something small and a little bit odd: RadioShack. “I walked there — it was a little bit of a long walk — and I looked at all the transistors they had.” He bought the highest-speed one he could find. “It worked out quite well,” says Wozniak. Except for the guy who picked the wrong day to leave class a few minutes early, anyway.

AS RADIOSHACK GOES, SO DOES A PART OF SILICON VALLEY’S HISTORY.

Today, RadioShack filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Part of a coming reorganization will involve co-branding as many as 1,750 stores with Sprint, one of the company’s largest creditors, and will almost certainly result in the closing of many others. While the RadioShack name may live on, its original spirit is probably gone for good. As it goes, so goes one of the unsung heroes of a generation of tinkerers and builders, a key piece of the Silicon Valley tech-boom puzzle.

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.

There’d probably be no Dell, either. It was inside his local RadioShack that a high-school-age Michael Dell first began tinkering with computers, all while saving up to buy his own Apple II. Which, as he recalls in “Direct from Dell,” he promptly took apart. (Can’t do that at RadioShack.) His parents were furious, but putting the computer back together was the beginning of the business that was the beginning of Dell. That store was also where he discovered he could buy computer parts, put them together himself, and sell them cheaper by going straight to buyers.

RADIOSHACK WAS MUCH MORE THAN JUST A STORE.

In its heyday, RadioShack was so much more than a store — it was an art gallery, a museum, a school. “You didn’t really have really good electronics magazines full of what’s available,” Wozniak remembers. “You had a few catalogues that were full of things like walkie-talkies, but if you went down to RadioShack you could actually see something.” As a teenager he would walk into stores and soak up information, spending hours reading labels, and memorizing prices and feature lists. It was inside those walls where so many watched the technological revolution unfold — and where they first jumped in.

The company’s downfall doesn’t just affect these builders, though, the teenagers like Woz who bought diodes by the bag. It means there’s no place for the fixers, either: people ready to pull up their sleeves and break out the tools when something breaks. Those were always the store’s primary customers, the ones who bought the newest thing and then came back when it broke.

RadioShack didn’t leave fixers; the fixers left RadioShack. Our TVs don’t come with vacuum tubes anymore, and woe to the enterprising owner who cracks open his flatscreen to fix a dead pixel. There’s nothing we can fix about our iPhones, really. An entire generation of inventors and innovators grew up taking things apart and putting them back together; now we tinker with apps and services, not the hardware that runs them. Code Academy is a more appropriate DIY shop these days, as hackers memorize CSS rows instead of soldering techniques.

Of course, you can’t say The Shack didn’t try to modernize. It shifted its focus dramatically in recent years, to “mobility” and selling high-end electronics. It just didn’t work; that was never what the company was known for. Maybe RadioShack’s biggest problem isn’t that it missed the maker movement or failed to see smartphones coming; maybe it’s that there’s just nothing to take apart anymore. RadioShack’s best idea was to be a tinkerer’s haven, and there aren’t enough tinkerers anymore.

Actually, no. That’s the second-biggest problem. Woz nails the biggest, even as he tries to lament the company’s loss. “I use RadioShack probably more than any other electronics store… aside from the internet.”