[TriLUG] Radio Shack Catalogs

[Peter Neilson via TriLUG]

1957 catalog 6SN7-GTB $1.26. I bought plenty of those for fixing local TV  
sets that could not hold vertical sync. Took the B&M train in to North  
Station, just a few blocks from 167 Washington Street in Boston. Spent a  
lot of time there. Bought a lot of parts, but not enough. My supply of  
pre-WWII resistors and capacitors from junk I'd inherited ensured that I  
built equipment using bad parts. No wonder most of my stuff didn't work  
right. My 80-meter Novice rig at 3734 kHz also put out a good signal at  
7468.

Looking back on it I wonder if the underlying TV-set problems might have  
been leaky paper capacitors. I never did go in with a VTVM and the Sams  
diagrams to try careful diagnosis. Instead I just swapped tubes.

Twenty years later, DEC field Service used the same method on computers.  
Swap replacement logic cards until the thing works.

How does the DEC Field Service guy fix a flat tire? Swaps tires until he  
find the one that's flat.

On Fri, 10 Mar 2017 10:33:28 -0500, Dwain Sims via TriLUG  
<trilug at trilug.org> wrote:

> ...
> Warning this can be a terrible time sink!!
>
> http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/catalog_directory.html
>
> I especially liked seeing the 4 function calculator from the 1973 catalog
> for 129.95! (That is $710 in 2017 dollars!) "A personal computer you will
> use for years."
>
> Dwain