They were always expensive, but you could go there on a Saturday afternoon and get something that will work - it might not be the right part, but it could be made to work. And expensive is relative - a $0.05 resister for $0.75 is very overpriced, and yet cheap. If you want to be in a hobby having that access close makes it a lot easier.

> ...but more importantly available a few miles away within practically any city.

We're around the same age and likely have similar memories. I poured over Radio Shack catalogs and weekly ads when I was a kid. When my family went to the local mall I'd make a beeline for the Radio Shack and play w/ the various computers there until my parents pried me away.

When I started doing PC tech work (in rural Western Ohio in the late 90s) it was always an option, no matter how far out in "the sticks" you were working, to drive to a Radio Shack for emergency parts. They might not have exactly what you needed, and you'd probably pay a hefty price, but their you could get the job done.

That ubiquity definitely left an impression on IT technicians of my generation. I was recently doing some work w/ a legacy system that called for some serial gender-bender/null modem cables. Not having any handy I had to improvise with some DE-9 to RJ-45 hoods and creative crimping to get what I needed. A cow-orker commented "We used to be able to just go to Radio Shack when we needed stuff like that in a hurry."

We spent hours at the local one. Picked up lots of parts and gear when I suppose they would have rather us bought their relabeled Realistic stuff. In junior high helped the 5th grade teacher with his network of CoCo 2s that used a CoCo 3 as a "file server" via a rotary dial to download courseware through the cassette interface. I wrote a fraction math trainer in BASIC for him to use with the students. He was still using it when I was in high school.

UK too. "Realistic" was their in-house brand btw.