For more than 70 years, RadioShack was an electronics hobbyist’s paradise. It went bankrupt multiple times in the past decade and now it’s been sold for parts. Its X account famously shills crypto with eye-catching NSFW posts. But the glory days of RadioShack live on thanks to the extensive archiving efforts of RadioShack Catalogs—a website that’s meticulously digitizing seven decades of the store’s catalogs.
From 1939 to 2011, RadioShack published a catalog that let users browse its various electronic bits from the comfort of their home. Some of them are hundreds of pages long and provide a window into America’s past. What was Raytheon before it was a company that built missiles? Page 8 of the very first RadioShack catalog shows you a friendly Raytheon that sold replacement vacuum tubes for radios.
Every catalog is present in a digitized and easy to read format. Browsers even play a sound clip of a page flipping when you move through the catalog. “In a world where technology continues to advance, this digital repository ensures that the memories, products, and innovations of RadioShack will forever be accessible to those who wish to reminisce and appreciate the enduring impact of this iconic retailer,” the site says.
The catalogs chronicle America’s past as viewed through the lens of electronics nerds. An eagle is emblazoned on the cover of the 1945 catalog, its outline housing soldiers, a warplane, and a naval vessel. The 1965 catalog looks like a sci-fi pulp cover and shows a rocket blasting through space surrounded by strange planets. The 2002 catalog is full of barcodes designed to work with CueCats, a brief technological fad had people hooking up a cat shaped barcode scanner to their PCs.
RadioShack Catalogs also has a YouTube channel housing 273 different videos that constitute the collected video ephemera of the store. There’s training videos, commercials, internal sales demonstrations, and commercials for long forgotten devices. Did you know RadioShack had a theme song in the 1980s? Now you can hear it.
There’s also internal documents detailing the history of the company, commercials, and even reprints of “Answers” magazine. “Published in the 1980s, Tandy’s Answers Magazine was a complimentary slick glossy magazine produced by Tandy Corporation for information on its variant line of home and business computers,” the site explains.
Curating the world’s RadioShack information isn’t cheap or easy work and the site’s owner is looking for help. “The process of meticulously disassembling, hand-scanning, digitally enhancing images, organizing, and preparing each catalog page for online viewing is incredibly time-consuming. Additionally, there are continuous expenses involved in acquiring new publications, conducting research, maintaining web hosting, and covering other web-related costs to keep this site running,” the site says, next to a button where people can donate to help cover their costs.
