Oh, this one got me right in the chest. Someone over at MSN put together a lovely roundup of 12 classic RadioShack electronics, and I spent a happy half hour nodding along like I was flipping through an old family photo album.

If you're my age or close to it, RadioShack wasn't just a store. It was a Saturday afternoon. It was the place you dragged your dad to when your walkie-talkies stopped working, and the fellow behind the counter, always oddly knowledgeable, would find the exact resistor you needed in one of those hundred little drawers. When Apple introduced the Macintosh back in 1984, that whole personal computing revolution didn't come out of nowhere. A lot of it grew out of exactly that kind of hands-on tinkering culture, the kind RadioShack fed for decades.

The roundup covers the greatest hits, including the TRS-80 computer, which my brother-in-law swore by long after the rest of us had moved on, and the car phones, those early bricks that make today's slimmest foldables look downright delicate by comparison. I remember when 1GB of storage was unthinkable and a phone in your car was pure science fiction. Well, the future arrived, and it was beige and bolted to the console.

What struck me reading through the list is how much of that era was genuinely good technology, and how much of it was stuff we loved anyway. My granddaughter Jess laughs at some of my old gadgets when she visits, but she hovered over my vintage handheld radio for twenty minutes last Thanksgiving, absolutely fascinated. There's a lesson in that somewhere.

And let's be fair to the old girl. RadioShack sold plenty of junk too, and near the end the stores got sad, half phone cases and half despair. But at its peak, that company put real electronics into the hands of ordinary people. You didn't need an engineering degree or a big budget, you needed curiosity and about twenty dollars. That combination is rarer than it sounds today, when everything arrives sealed and glued shut.

If Marcus Pitts ever writes one of his deep-dives on the TRS-80, I'll link it here, because he's much better than I am at explaining what actually made those machines tick under the hood. I just know they made people fall in love with computing, and I got to watch it happen from the cheap seats.

Go take a look at the full list. I guarantee at least one item will make you smile, and one will make you say "oh, I forgot I owned that." And if you've still got one of these in a closet somewhere, do me a favor: don't throw it out until you've shown it to a kid. Technology should work for you, but sometimes its real job is making memories.