"I bet RadioShack was great once," writes former employee Jon Bois in a much-circulated 2014 piece for SB Nation. "I can't look through their decades-old catalogs and come away with any other impression. They sold giant walnut-wood speakers I'd kill to have today. They sold computers back when people were trying to understand what they were. When I was a little kid, going to RadioShack was better than going to the toy store. It was the toy store for tall people."
Still, all those catalogs live on, free to browse in the digital archive at Radioshackcatalogs.com. The first volume dates from 1939, by which time Radio Shack (as its name was originally written) had already been in business for seventeen years. "This catalog is intended to serve as a comprehensive and accurate listing of what we believe to be the essential and unusual requirements of the radio amateur, the service man, laboratories, industries, and schools," declares its opening letter to the customer.
Neither service nor growth remained features of the company by the time Bois was working there. But it had been a pretty glorious run: to behold the first 50 years of RadioShack catalogs is to behold nothing less than the evolution of American consumer electronics. At first directed toward those with specialized interests, it shifted focus to more general consumers.
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