The Tech Archived · VIDEO ESSAY

The Rise and Fall of RadioShack: How the World’s Number One PC Maker Went Bankrupt Twice

RadioShack filed for bankruptcy twice, but before it did, it was once the largest personal computer manufacturer in the world. In nineteen seventy-seven, the company launched the TRS-80, one of the three machines that started the personal computer revolution, accounting for roughly half of all PC sales in the United States that year. By the early nineteen nineties, Tandy Corporation, RadioShack’s parent company, had become the biggest PC maker on the planet, building computers for Digital Equipment Corporation, Olivetti, Panasonic and AST Research from a factory in Fort Worth, Texas. What followed was a sequence of decisions that surrendered each of those positions before they had reached their full value: the sale of the manufacturing business in nineteen ninety-three, the collapse of the Incredible Universe big-box experiment, the pivot to carrier commissions from Sprint that Sprint itself described, at the end, as immaterial to its results. This documentary covers the complete story, from the leather goods company that bought a bankrupt Boston electronics retailer for three hundred thousand dollars in nineteen sixty-two, to seven thousand stores, to two bankruptcy filings in three years.