While we were debating about whether it even makes any sense to reboot RadioShack, or indeed any brick-and-mortar electronics store in the modern era, Dan Maloney and I stumbled on what probably is the real source of all of our greybeard nostalgia for the store chain: inspiration.

For both of us, the appeal of a store like RadioShack was going through the place and thinking of what you’d do with all of those parts. Looking at the back of the beefiest MOSFET in the joint, you’d think about all the current you could pass with it. Or what you’d do with all of those piezo buzzers. And if you didn’t know yet what electronics project you wanted to make, there were things like the Forrest Mims notebooks to inspire you. There you’d find a way to turn the humble LED into a light sensor, whether you needed to or not. I wonder how many packs of assorted LEDs that book sold?!

Dan got his first hands on with a computer in RadioShack as well, because they let folks try them right there. If you didn’t know what you wanted a computer for, and that was the big question of the early microcomputer era, you could head into the store yourself and find out. Seeing, and playing with, Demon Dancer inspired.

A lot of this role is taken over by hackerspaces these days, and even more is taken by the Internet itself, of course. We have no shortage of inspiration – just read a day’s worth of Hackaday if you don’t believe me. So is there any room left for RadioShack’s inspirational role? Maybe not. But if that’s the cost of living in a world where we have access to more great ideas than we’ll ever have time to execute, then so be it!