"There was a time when Radio Shack offered an incredible variety of supplies for the electronics hobbyist" Bit of a distraction perhaps. Yep, incredible variet

"There was a time when Radio Shack offered an incredible variety of supplies for the electronics hobbyist" Bit of a distraction perhaps. Yep, incredible variety. All at the worst value for money known to mankind (at least in the UK). Pack of three resistors. £1.95. Or was that £5.95? In 1970s or 1980. Enough bits for a simple op amp demo project £80, arm and leg. If memory serves, they were an early adopter of custom currency. Instead of pricing the items on shelves they colour coded the cheap (lol) stuff. Red dot meant 1.95, blue 5.95 etc. There were only 5 or 7 price bands. I hated the place. Thankfully in the back of an electronics mag were ads for a mysterious company "Maplin" that had a mail order catalogue. Everything was 10% or less of Tandy prices. Surprisingly Maplin was the one that lasted longest, though it was many years before they had a store nearby. On to books. The Radio Shack quick reference posters, cards, etc were brilliant. So I grabbed a a few indecipherable Radio Shack introductory books explaining various topics. They rarely seemed to explain anything. They were all shrink wrapped so you couldn't skim in store. I forget the authors though. I just remember quickly learning their own titles were something to avoid. I may have missed a dozen great authors thanks to that lesson. :) The ones to get were the Babani books as they were 95p each for a 100 page paperback. Not shrink wrapped either! Thankfully long before the end of the Net Book Agreement (Price printed on cover by publisher) or Radio shack would have sold them for a tenner. Most of which seemed to be by a guy called R A Penfold. Don't ever remember reading an "about the author". Never did work out if he was a real author or a house pen name as he was impossibly prolific. Turns out yes, indeed, he was one guy. Who must have written hundreds of electronics, radio, and other hobbyist books.