Scratching the Surface: Cell Phones, Computers, and the End of Radio Shack

I got here by way of Chris Peacock’s Tinker’s Lament of January 21, in which he published an appreciation of Radio Shack. My own appreciation/obituary of RS is a bit harsher: https://lawschoolissoover.wordpress.com/2014/12/10/i-come-to-bury-radio-shack-and-to-praise-it/. I wrote it in December, after reading yet another eulogy for the store.

At the time I thought, as does Peacock, that “RadioShack created its own fate.” I wrote then that

[Radio Shack] was the last holdout for geeks, but it didn’t want to sell to geeks, it wanted to sell to people who would spend too much for too little and, in that regard, Radio Shack could never compete with cell phone carriers, or stereo stores.

Since December, my local Radio Shack has become a clearance center, with “everything in the store 25% off.” This was good for me when I needed a tiny microphone for a project I was working on. But it’s the death rattle of Radio Shack.

I now believe, however, that Radio Shack didn’t commit suicide. It was murdered. It was killed by the wonderful devices that surround us now, from computers to cell phones, and more specifically, by what is—and isn’t—inside them.

Computers are made of the basic parts of electronic theory—transistors, resistors, capacitors, a few inductors, some diodes. In theory, this means that it should be easy to repair a computer. In fact, however, that is far from true.

Computers take advantage of a mode of construction called surface mounting. In the Olde Days (c. 1973), a circuit board was either a chunk of phenolic, drilled with a uniform grid of holes, into which you pushed metal pins—the pins acting as places to mount components and join them together—or it was an etched board that started out with a layer of copper on one side. These latter then had a layer of ‘resist’ painted or printed (hence printed circuits) onto then in the shape of the connections in the circuit, and were dipped in an acid bath that ate away any uncoated copper. Drill holes where the tiny wire leads went through the board, and then solder them in place—or to the pins of the “perfboard”—and you had a circuit.

My earliest projects were built on perfboard; by the time I was in high school, I learned to make printed circuit boards. And the summer I graduated, I worked in a factory running a wave-soldering machine that took the boards, “stuffed” with components by similarly low-paid workers, and ran them over a wave of liquid metal at 550 degrees Farenheit. The liquid stuck the copper circuit lines and the component leads and instantly did what it took hours for me to do, carefully (and sometime not so carefully) assembling and soldering my boards.

Here’s a printed circuit board with “discrete” components:

See those tan tubes with rings of color? Resistors. The blue cans with metallic tops? Capacitors. There are a couple of transistors, labeled T1 and T2, and some glass-bodied diodes. The long black item (IC1) is an integrated circuit—nearly a complete computer—that has been mounted in a socket.

Surface-mount technology (SMT) changed all that. Components could be reduced in size, since they were placed by machines rather than humans, and that meant more could be packed on a smaller board. And along with the rise of SMT came a similar rise in the deep integration of chips—integrated circuits. It became possible to build millions of transistors into a wafter of silicon no larger than the nail on your little finger.

Here’s a circuit that is very similar to the previous illustration, built with SMT parts:

This new technology, combined with manufacturing outside the US, brought us a world of wonderful new things.

The first computer I owned was a portable that cost nearly $1,500 in 1984. It processed data 8 bits at a time, had 64K of RAM, 400K total disk storage in the form of two single-sided floppy disks, and a 9" green screen on the front of a glass tube. The CPU ran at a blazing 4 MHz. It must have weighed around 30 pounds in its sheet-metal case. It was, for the most part, not built with SMT technology. It was built in California.

The machine I’m using now is a notebook, a few years old, but it cost (when new—I got it for a fraction of this four years ago) around $500. It processes data 32 or 64 bits at a time and has 4GB of RAM. It came with a 320GB hard drive that I replaced with a 120GB solid state drive, and it has an 11.6" color screen lit by LEDs. The CPU runs at variable speed, up to the neighborhood of 1.6 GHz. It weighs around three pounds, and was built with SMT technology. In China.

This is what killed Radio Shack. We did. It’s no surprise that many of the comments on Craig Anderton’s book complain that parts are no longer available. You can probably find them (or equivalent replacements) if you dig deep, but they’re not SMT parts. And SMT owns us as much as we own it.

For the most part, devices built with SMT parts are difficult or impossible to repair. You might be able to fix the outside (when I was in Law School not long ago, I spent a fair bit of time repairing the power cords/connectors of other students’ notebooks) but the stuff inside? Forget it. If you computer dies because a capacitor or resistor dies, good luck even finding the part, let alone replacing it. Generally, your best bet is to replace the motherboard (if you can find it) or expansion card.

These devices, and our adoption of them, killed Radio Shack. Cell phones are pure SMT, as are computers, and there are now computers in just about everything. Odds are that your cheap auto-to-USB adapter charger was build with SMT.

I still go to Radio Shack. I had to pick up a replacement 1/4" jack for my guitar the other day, and it was closer (and probably cheaper) than the music store.

I still build electrical and electronic projects.

And I have noted a new generation of builders—those to whom Arduino is an instantly-recognizable name. Alas, at 56, I do not anticipate becoming part of that generation. But it’s heartening to see it.

So we killed Radio Shack, or will do so very shortly. Our nostalgia will soon be nothing more than an entry in Wikipedia.

Pardon me while I use my notebook to go browse eBay for a mint DX150A.