For over 70 years, Radio Shack was a haven for electronics enthusiasts. It went bankrupt multiple times over the past decade and is now being sold for parts. Radio Shack’s X account is notorious for promoting cryptocurrency in eye-catching, NSFW posts. But Radio Shack’s glory days live on thanks to a massive archiving effort by the Radio Shack Catalog, a website that has meticulously digitized 70 years of the store’s catalog.
From 1939 to 2011, RadioShack published catalogs that allowed customers to browse a wide variety of electronics from the comfort of their own home. Some catalogs are hundreds of pages long and offer a glimpse into America’s past. What was Raytheon like before it became a company that built missiles? Page 8 of the first RadioShack catalog introduces you to friendly Raytheon, a company that sold replacement vacuum tubes for radios.
All catalogs have been digitized and are available in an easy-to-read format. Your browser even plays sound clips of the pages turning as you move through the catalog. “In a world where technology continues to advance, this digital repository ensures that RadioShack memories, products and innovations will remain forever accessible to those who wish to reminisce and understand the enduring impact of this iconic retailer,” the site reads.
The catalogs chronicle America’s past from an electronics geek’s perspective: The 1945 catalog cover features an eagle outlined with soldiers, fighter planes, and naval ships; the 1965 catalog resembles the cover of a sci-fi magazine, depicting a rocket hurtling through space surrounded by strange planets; the 2002 catalog is full of barcodes designed to work with CueCat, a temporary tech fad that involved connecting a cat-shaped barcode scanner to a PC.
RadioShack Catalogs also has a YouTube channel with 273 different videos from the store’s video collection. There are training videos, commercials, in-store sales demonstrations, commercials for long-forgotten devices, and more. Did you know RadioShack had a theme song in the 1980s? Now you can listen to it.
There are internal documents detailing the company’s history, commercials, and even a reprint of “Answers” magazine. “Tandy’s Answers Magazine, published in the 1980s, was a glossy periodical published by Tandy Corporation to provide information about its various product lines of home and business computers,” the site explains.
Organizing RadioShack information from around the world is neither a cheap nor easy job, and the site’s owners are asking for help: “The process of carefully dismantling each page of the catalog, scanning it by hand, digitizing the images, organizing them, and preparing them for online viewing is incredibly time-consuming. In addition, keeping this site running incurs ongoing expenses, including acquiring new publications, conducting research, maintaining web hosting, and paying other web-related costs,” the site reads, next to a button where you can donate to help cover the costs.
