My original TRS-80 Color Computer came with a cassette drive. It was essentially a standard Radio Shack cassette recorder/player that had the Tandy logo on it. It was otherwise identical to an existing mainstream recorder model that was sold at Radio Shack at the time.
(For those not old enough to remember, Tandy was the parent corporation of Radio Shack, and their personal computer products were all sold under the Tandy or TRS (Tandy Radio Shack) brand names.)
Yep. I didnât use one (I used a cassette recorder I already owned), but TRS recommended theirs.
The primary difference between theirs and most others is that the âremoteâ jack (to start/stop the tape motor) on most tape decks is hard-wired to the motor (so a switch on a microphone can start/stop it), but on the TRS deck, it is wired to a relay that is wired to the motor.
This was important because the CoCoâs cassette interface included a connector to plug in to that remote jack. A relay (I think itâs actually a reed switch) on the CoCoâs motherboard could turn the cassette motor on/off under software control (typically as a part of loading/saving content from tape). But with most tape decks (including mine), running the tape motorâs current through that switch tended to ruin it (as it did on my CoCo). No damage to the digital circuitry, but it could no longer stop the motor (the switch contacts fused together). So I stopped using that connector and manually pressed play/record/stop to control the tape motor.
And Appleâs iPhones, Macs and primarily Apple Stores, both physical and online, were major contributors to Tandy Radio Shackâs demise.
Yes, but not as much as you seem to be implying. Bad corporate strategy was probably the biggest factor. That really started in the mid-â90s, when they started pivoting away from the electronics hobbyist market and more into the mainstream electronics markets, betting heavily on cellphones and wireless services. They divested themselves of pretty much all of their house brands, replacing them with other manufacturersâ products that varied much more in quality than the items they had manufactured themselves. And then they were absolutely caught flat-footed by the rapid rise of online retail. It was just one misstep after another.
Reading their corporate history on Wikipedia is actually rather illuminating for those of us who watched the company decline. Theyâre one of the few major retailers from the '90s and 2000s that went under due to their own miscalculations rather than being victims of predatory takeovers by private equity firms.
I doubt it. Radio Shack was more about hobbyist tinkering than consumer goods. They were often the easiest available source for parts in small quantities, mostly adequate testing equipment, and even meeting other tinkerers. One big thing that hurt their business was that they got so data greedy towards the end that it was a hassle to buy anything from them. The clerks would aggressively not finish a sale unless you coughed up a name and address even for a small cash sale, and using a credit card was pretty much a non-starter. So everyone I knew stopped going there even to window shop and found other sources even if they were less convenient.
As I remember it, Radio Shack was where you went for electronic components and gadgets when you couldnât find a better electronics store, which was frequently the case in many places. Tandy bought them in 1962, when radios and televisions had tubes and to fix them you had to take the tubes out of the set and plug them in a tester, they buy replacements. That market faded away quickly, so they expended to other electronics, but I was never impressed by their stock. In the 80s they were a convenient place to find electronic toys. The last one in our area was a small one in a small shopping plaza that I hadnât entered in years before it folded sometime in the early 2000s.
Thatâs how Radio Shack started. Not long after, they decided to switch focus on the enormously bigger, fastest growing, and much more profitable consumer and business to business markets. The article Marquelle quoted has a good run down about Radio Shackâs short life span after their switch.
The San Francisco subway system still uses 5.25-inch floppy disks, which were popular in the 1980s, to control their train traffic.
Mind blowing really
SF Muni is well aware of the problem:
Of course, the estimated completion date is 2029.
I would note the âIf itâs not broke, donât update itâ philosophy leads to situations such as this. Maintenance becomes a headache because the support structure deteriorates. So, eventually, a modern system becomes costly and takes years to implement to keep things from breaking in the transition.
No need to rush. It will be January 2038 when older Unix and associated operating systems reach the 32 bit limit of its seconds counter 
https://www.vdrsyd.com/aoaug/2000bug.html#dates
I just hope they have plenty of backup copies of those diskettes and a stockpile of blanks that can use for making more copies in the future.
Floppies can be very reliable, but they donât last forever.
If they are simply concerned about floppy drives and media breaking, they can further postpone the inevitable using a floppy drive emulator. These are small computers (often powered by a Raspberry Pi or similarly small hardware) that connect to a computer via its normal floppy drive cable and emulate a physical drive, using disk images (usually stored on an SD card) as the media.
Hereâs an example of one that works with older Macs:
https://www.journaldulapin.com/2024/01/05/floppy-emu-disquette/
Floppies? Guys, you havenât lived until youâve handled one of these:
FORTRAN, in case youâre wondering
Or dropped them 
My first computer class in college. The typing department had 8â floppies at the time. Fall 1983
Diane
I used to have a Sony Mavica digital camera that used a floppy disk. There werenât very many digital cameras back then. Needless to say, the picture quality was poor and the video was horrible. But I still loved the camera.
I used FORTRAN, COBOL and RPG. The machine I worked on, IBM System 3, used 96-column punch cards instead of 80 and 8-inch floppy disks.
Yeah, it was so weird that FORTRAN made us write all our comments in German!
@schwartz I feel I have been found out (or in FORTRAN: Ich fĂźhle mich ertappt.)
As well as having the card for the 029/129 program drum that allowed you to âtab overâ or âskipâ over the statement number field, the comment field, and skip to column 73 so that you could properly sequence the cards.
Those of us who used this equipment knew what a âchadâ was long before the 2000 US election.
Ka chunk, ka chunkâŚ
