I considered saying "8P8C" for the jack, as well. >smile<

My childhood as well! In 6th and 7th grade my parents would drop me off at the mall 9am on Saturday and pick me up around 5pm. I spent all day at the Radio Shack (and a bit of time at the arcade after lunch). Learned to program in BASIC on the Model III and the CoCo and wrote all kinds of demo programs. They tolerated me there all day since I was also happy to talk to customers and show them how the computers worked and how to write simple programs.

By end of 7th grade I'd saved enough money to buy a CoCo to program at home, so my long days at Radio Shack came to an end but I'd still drop by for a bit every weekend.

One of the lesser known and vastly underrated systems of the 80s was a CoCo running OS-9, a multiuser multitasking operating system on an 8-bit CPU! OS-9 Level 2 was particularly powerful, and prepared me to move seamlessly to SunOS when I started university.

A common BASIC program I'd write on new-to-me computers was a FOR/NEXT loop to print all the characters in the character set. I remember discovering the color semigraphics characters in the CoCo character set and being weirded-out. I'd never seen anything like that on any of the other machines I'd ever used.

I snared a CoCo2 a few years ago so I could re-live a few of those memories (and explore the machine with actual documentation).

The complete version is also available there for purchase.

OTOH, some items were surprisingly cheap. A couple years after college, I had a small business running out of a spare bedroom making temperature monitors and there was a shielded audio cable with connector that I used for the sensor. Radio Shack's price was about $1.50 each but all the "real" parts houses were at least 5x that.

As an engineer my boss will approve $80 for a single resister after overnight shipping if that is what I need. The factory is buying the resisters a reel at a time (or similar large quantities)

I used to get assortments from Radio Shack with dozens of mundane resistors for a few dollars. That was also expensive per-part, but the convenience of have-it-now, cash-and-carry has a price.

Today, I can order a kit with 1,000 1/8W resistors, of 50 different values, for $7.99 from Amazon. I can build any specific resistor value I want with that kit. It will show up tomorrow, but if I'd looked earlier in the day then I'd have found that I could have it yet today for an extra $3.

Or: I can get an assembled book of 2900 1/8W through-hole resistors from AliExpress. 145 values, in pockets with plainly-readable labels, one value per pocket, all wrapped up in durable-enough 6-ring binder. That's $25 and ships free; I'd expect it to arrive in a week or two.

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So what I've done for noodling around at home is buy inexpensive assortments. In this way, I've already got resistors in stock at home. And capacitors, diodes, transistors, and even jellybean ICs -- along with a better selection of small metric stainless hardware than Ace Hardware offers. I don't miss Radio Shack for these parts, and I'm done paying 53 cents for each M3 x 10mm screw at the hardware store.

It did not cost very much to procure this stuff (and I bought it slowly over time, as-needed, which spread out the expense and avoided effort to forecast need), and it doesn't take up much room to keep it around.

It's pretty good to be able to build a thing on a whim.

Absolutely, in their heyday.

By the end, I met an employee who very derisively told me I didn't need to connect all three terminals on a transistor for it to work. According to him, the collector was often skipped in circuits.

So, by that single indicator, they were already the Walking Dead. But I could ignore him and still buy what I needed, then.

It didn't push to the computers; we loaded the program from floppy to the CoCo 3 and then for each CoCo 2 manually executed a cassette load from the CoCo 3 via the rotary link, but it worked and was much cheaper than equipping each client with its own storage.