[TriLUG] Radio Shack Catalogs

[Pete Soper via TriLUG]

A little after the time this Polypaks ad was current (75) I was hiking 
from Westboro to their retail counter in Wakefield (near Boston). I 
still have a box of their floor sweepings TTL DIPs that I can't make 
myself throw away. Check out the price of an 8080 chip in the upper 
right corner. Notice the 1k bit RAM chips are $3.95. A couple years 
after this ad I soldered 160 of those together in my first PC (SWTPC 6800).

http://www.retrotechnology.com/vcfmw9/73_aug75_polypaks.jpg

-Pete

On 03/10/2017 01:07 PM, Peter Neilson via TriLUG wrote:
> 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