I think I'm officially old...

[patman]

Radio Shack for me...

[Pilgrim]

I also have a Simpson meter.

[Dave W]

Radio Shack for me...

Poor Radio Shack. I'd better redeem my battery of the month card before it's too late. 

[Pilgrim]

Yup, they'll probably be no more than another mall-type cell phone store.

[dadagoboi]

Yup, they'll probably be no more than another mall-type cell phone store.

Local Radio Snack in the one horse town I live in is now 'Santa Fe Electronics'.  Busier than it ever was as a RS in my 7 years here.  Stopped in to buy some contact cleaner the other day and there were 4 other customers in the store on a Tuesday morning.  Computer repair business seems to be doing well among other things.

[Pilgrim]

That's a good thought.  Lots more people needing computer/tablet/phone repair than electronic components today.

[uwe]

I'm not supposed to use two spaces after a period?  When did this happen?

I leaerned it that way too - at The American School of Kinshasa between 73 and 76 with our Brit typing teacher, dear Mrs Adderl(e?)y. She didn't really like me, maybe a Vergeltungswaffe had killed her pet rabbit or maybe she didn't like the fact that one day she caught me banging (I hasten to add here: away on) my typewriter to not the prescribed typing tape but - you guessed it! - a tape of Deep Purple's Burn. She didn't think it was funny, never mind that they were her countrymen after all and that the Burn lyric offered some pertinent relevance to her and her teaching methods:

"I didn't believe she was devil's sperm.
She said, "Curse you all, you'll never learn!
When I leave there's no return."

Finer irony was never really Mrs. Adderl(e?)y's forte. I finished her typing class with a magnificent D as a grade. 

Come to think of it, we also had a tape of Status Quo's Quo album running in her class, again some pertinence there:



All that said and written, I believe that double space thing was very much an Anglo-American practice - I'm not aware of it ever happening in Germany. We did other things, like writing  "g e s p e r r t"  if you wanted to  e m p h a s i z e something. Did you guys

l e a r n   t h a t 

too?  It went out of style ( o u t  o f  s t y l e  ) with the advent of bold type possibilities.

[OldManC]

We tested our tubes at 7-11.

For a while there I could choose 7-11, Thrifty Drug Store (had excellent ice-cream cones for 5/10/15 cents), or Radio Shack. That's going back a few years...

[Pilgrim]

We tested tubes at the grocery store.  They had a waist-high tube tester up front, and the replacement tubes were inside the case.  It was the honor system - find a bad one, grab a replacement, carry it to the register to buy it.