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_Wired 1.3_
ELECTROSPHERE
*************

Battletech's New Beachheads 
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

-- By Linda Jacobson

The "location-based" VR pioneers are poised to capture new ground, aided 
by a new recruit named...Disney.


Goggleheads, they call us. "They" think virtual reality comes in one 
flavor - Goggles&Gloves - and smirk when we wax poetic about VR's 
potential. Maybe they're unaware of a team of synthetic-digital 
environmentalists led by Merchant Marine Academy drop-out Jordan Weisman 
and Walt's grandnephew, Tim Disney. These guys know you don't need a 
helmet to stick your head in cyberspace. All you need is a ticket to the 
realm of VR dubbed "location-based entertainment." 

Location-based entertainment blends amusement park ride and videogame, 
adds a storyline, and serves it up via computer-based graphics, sound, 
input and display technologies. No helmets required, just "pods," or 
cockpits installed in a thematic setting, beckoning passengers to 
virtually soar into bit-borne fantasy worlds.

Chicago's Virtual World Entertainment (VWE) is aggressively peddling 
this flavor of VR - sometimes known as second-person virtual reality (as 
opposed to first-person or immersive). VWE's ability to mass-market its 
product results from Disney's ingredient. Last December he poured a 
reported $10 to $15 million into VWE, inspiring a Variety editor to pen 
the head, "Tim Disney Gets Dose of Reality."

Hollywood didn't laud VWE's creators when they conceived the concept in 
1980. No one did. VWE sprouted from the twisted minds of Jordan Weisman 
and his Academy classmate Ross Babcock, who spent their teens engrossed 
in Dungeons & Dragons. A dyslexic, Jordan delved into fantasy role-
playing games because they offered "a big impetus to read." He spent his 
bar mitzvah money on an Apple II. In 1979, Jordan and Ross realized that 
combining role-playing games with PCs could create a new kind of 
entertainment. 

"Role-playing games require lots of reading and imagination, and not 
many people are willing to put that effort into their entertainment," 
Jordan says. "But everyone always wanted to hear the stories of our 
games. Our friends knew all about our character, as if we were the 
heroes in a movie. Then, at the Academy, I visited a simulator used to 
train pilots, a $100-million complex with computers the size of a house. 
It struck me that if you put enough Apple IIs in one place and networked 
them, you could achieve that kind of simulation for much less money. 
Then you could create a collective audio-visual experience that was as 
empowering but more popular than role-playing games, and people could 
become the stars of their own movies."

The affable dreamer Jordan and the analytical Ross created the 
"BattleTech" storyline about a futuristic military zone. In Chicago, 
after leaving the Academy, the two 19-year-olds founded Environmental 
Simulation Projects (ESP) to create a BattleTech simulation game system. 
They tried to raise money, failed repeatedly, and so decided to get rich 
and build BattleTech themselves. With $150, they launched another 
company, FASA (for Fredonian Aeronautics & Space Administration, a name 
meaningful to Marx Brothers' Duck Soup fans). FASA published BattleTech 
as a board game. By 1987 FASA was the world's second largest role-
playing game company. 

Jordan attributes FASA's success to its approach. The role-playing game 
industry grew out of military simulations; its products are "realism- 
and rule-driven." FASA instead emphasized "the creation of a world. We 
designed games by starting with a geopolitical situation and crafting an 
environment that breeds heroes. We explored what those heroes did and 
wore, what vehicles and weapons they used. The story attracted people."

In 1987 Jordan and Ross started investing FASA profits in R&D for their 
original ESP simulation project. In 1989, when "virtual reality" 
attained buzzword status, they changed ESP's name to Virtual World 
Entertainment. A year later they opened BattleTech Center. It featured 
sixteen networked cockpits that allow teams to wage war in a simulated 
BattleTech environment, a virtual world seen on video screens and 
experienced both inside and outside the cockpits. Billed as the world's 
first "location-based virtual reality entertainment center," BattleTech 
Center (recently renamed Virtual World Center) sold 300,000 tickets in 
two years. Last August, Jordan and Ross brought BattleTech to Japan. The 
32-cockpit Yokohama BattleTech sold 30,000 tickets in the first month. 

People with the name "Disney" can appreciate the significance of these 
feats. Tim Disney is a Harvard graduate (class of 1983) with a fine arts 
degree. After writing for Walt Disney Studios, then creating a Comedy 
Central game show, he invested in fun-oriented VR last December: VWE was 
his beneficiary. Today Tim is the company's chairman of the board. 
Joining him to help Jordan and Ross run VWE are Andrew Messing (formerly 
with Shamrock Holdings, a Disney money firm) and Charlie Fink (formerly 
a Walt Disney Pictures VP). They plan to turn VWE into a diversified 
entertainment enterprise befitting their collective Midas touch.

The original Virtual World Center inhabits a shopping mall in Chicago. 
For $7 you can enter this networked simulation of 31st-century humanoid 
fighting machines, called "BattleMechs." After a training and strategy 
session with uniformed BattleTech officers, you climb into a slick-
looking, enclosed pod containing a fighter-plane seat, festooned dash, 
and two color display screens; that's your 'Mech. You wage a ten-minute 
war against other players driving other 'Mechs, talking to your 
teammates by microphone. Team members cooperate to accomplish a mission. 
All games are recorded for database storage so BattleTech can track your 
proficiency and promote you to higher game-play levels. At the end of 
the game, you get a printout of your actions and watch a Mac Quadra-
driven display of the game - physical validations of your virtual 
experience. 

Behind BattleTech is a complex network of PCs. Concealed inside each pod 
are five custom Texas Instruments- and Motorola-based computers that 
handle game and simulation code, I/O, graphics, and sound. Five speakers 
in the cockpit pump out twelve independent channels of sound effects. 
The pods' on-screen graphics show accurate renderings of the virtual 
world, including light sources and 3-D perspectives. To optimize 
computer power, the pods' display system doesn't redraw each 'Mech 
during gameplay. Instead, it immediately selects and flashes an 
appropriate image from a collection of 'Mech pictures. Outside the pods, 
a hot-rodded Quadra on the network serves as the Operator's Station; 
players poke its touch-screen before game-play to customize their 
adventures. VWE originates all programming (written in C), engineering, 
and artwork.

In BattleTech, "interactive" means pitting your skills against others' 
skills, not a computer, and not limiting your actions to a few pre-
programmed paths. You have options: hide behind trees, duck under rocks, 
scramble into buildings. No two games ever play the same way. And 
"immersive" means sensorial inclusion in actual and computer-generated 
BattleTech environments. The center's entire design supports the 
illusion of being in a place far, far away from a shopping mall.

The Virtual World Center has spawned a subculture of Chicago twenty-
somethings, some with legendary status in "BattleTech Society" - 
regulars who go by such gaming names as Elvis, Poet, Hitman, and Maddog. 
Jordan says, "When all of you come out of a cockpit, you have shared an 
experience and you talk about it. You enter the environment with 
strangers and come out with friends. That's part of the attraction."

Sure, but who does it attract? BattleTech is fueled by testosterone; few 
players are female. When Jordan and Ross developed BattleTech, they saw 
so many risks in the overall concept that they decided the content 
should capitalize on the proven notion that most young males enjoy seek-
and-destroy games. 

Now that Jordan and company know their format appeals to a certain group 
(average age is 24.5), they're ready to try different approaches. "We're 
now creating an environment that is less intimidating, that from its 
very essence isn't exclusionary," Jordan says. "We also decided to 
create a theme that isn't dedicated to one storyline. The story starts 
in 1860 and comes up to present day. It's about an organization that 
unites explorer-adventurers with scientists in a quest to explore worlds 
beyond earth. We wove about 100 real-life historical personages into the 
story. The milieu shifts from the military BattleTech to a place based 
on exploration and discovery." The new VWE centers thus will offer 
different "adventures" within this single-theme environment.

These Centers open this summer in New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, the 
San Francisco Bay Area (Walnut Creek), and the Southwest. The Walnut 
Creek center opens first, in June. It's not too far from the NASA Ames 
Research Center where, in 1987, some goggleheads had the idea of 
combining a head-mounted display and data glove with 3-D sound, 
position-tracking, and multimedia data in the "Virtual Interactive 
Environment Workstation."

At first Jordan and Ross considered using helmets, but head-mounted 
displays limit movement and suffer from low resolution, time lag, and 
choppy frame rates. Besides, a big challenge in creating virtual worlds 
involves making participants forget about the technology and consider 
the environment "real." Jordan and Ross figured pod-based VR  better 
supports this suspension of disbelief. Pod-based VR, says Jordan, also 
is less intimidating "because you don't have to put something on your 
body. Plus, when you're 25 years old, looking stupid is the worst thing 
in the world." 

There's nothing stupid about the new Virtual World centers. Unlike the 
cold, gray-hued military setting of the original center, these have the 
ambience of a Victorian explorer's club: overstuffed leather chairs, 
woodwork, and the requisite high-tech elements. Jules Verne meets Blade 
Runner. No longer war-like in appearance, the pods are streamlined 
"transportation devices," as Jordan likes to call them. "The pilot gets 
in, hits a button, and the cockpit takes off into the other world and 
morphs into whatever it needs to be for that world" - either a 'Mech for 
BattleTech or a Martian pickup truck for the new "Red Planet" racing and 
exploration game.

What's next? R&D continues at Chicago headquarters. Hollywood's waiting 
to see how the Disney heritage of creativity will come into play here. 
Technologically speaking, Ross and his technoids aim for better graphics 
resolution, greater color depth, and higher frame rates. They see future 
Virtual World centers boasting new kinds of immersive technologies, 
quality texture mapping, and motion platforms. 

Meanwhile, VWE brass are power-lunching with movie and TV studios, 
publishers, videogame makers and toy manufacturers, inking deals to 
exploit the BattleTech title. Soon to come: comic books, cartoons, and 
the kinds of chotchkes that swelled the coffers of the creators of Bart 
and Barney. In the next three years, 30 Virtual World centers will open 
in Japan alone. All centers will be networked, so New Yorkers and 
Japanese can challenge each other ("telegame"!) in the same virtual 
world. Jordan predicts inter-city tournaments by year's end. Globally 
televised Virtual World Series games, anyone?

"Our goal," Jordan says, "is to create a legitimate entertainment format 
- something that, given time and technological growth, will give movies 
a run for their money. To do that it must be interesting to adults, with 
a story to escape into, not just something to eye/hand-coordinate and 
master." 

Herein lies one concept stoking VR development: the potential to produce 
entertainment in which the audience determines outcome in a meaningful 
way, engaging in conflict and resolution within a teamwork atmosphere. 
Virtual World centers present the tip of this iceberg. So what if they 
don't use goggles and gloves to place you in cyberspace? As VR 
researcher Carrie Heeter writes in the VR journal Presence: "Second-
person VR [requires] an almost outrageous leap of faith to transfer [the 
player] into a world on the screen. But perhaps that leap is a powerful 
first step to entering a virtual world. Like Peter Pan thinking a happy 
thought, once you make that initial leap, reality becomes plastic and 
you can fly."


-----------------------------------------------
Linda Jacobson is Wired's virtual worlds editor. Her book, Cyberarts: 
Exploring Art & Technology (Miller Freeman, 1992), is available 
throughout the real world.

**********************************************************************



Privacy Is My Life 
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The ACLU's Janlori Goldman just may be the most effective privacy lawyer 
in America.

-- Brock N. Meeks reports.

Six and a half years ago Janlori Goldman rode into the nation's power 
center dragging behind her the ideological baggage of a Luddite: 
Technology and its advocates are destroyers of privacy.

For Goldman, director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 
Project on Privacy and Technology, such thinking has always been woven 
into the fabric of American society: We all have the right to be left 
alone - the right to tell Government to stay the hell out of our lives.

But Goldman's self-confessed Luddite days are gone. She doesn't brook 
with the nay-saying privacy advocates of the past. Instead, she's 
concentrating on "moving privacy issues forward." To do that, she says, 
you have to work with the government, keeping privacy issues on 
everyone's legislative agenda. 

In our nanosecond culture, where state governments cross-reference their 
motor vehicle databases and credit card companies sell your address to 
the highest bidder, Goldman focuses on several issues, from preventing a 
display of your telephone number on someone's Caller ID device without 
your knowledge to blocking a prospective employer's access to your 
medical history.

Privacy protection is "the issue of the '90s," Goldman says, sitting in 
the "most private office" in the building - a cramped corner hideaway on 
the third floor of the ACLU's Washington, DC headquarters. From this 
unassuming building, a 12-year-old Little Leaguer could toss a rock 
through any of a dozen windows of the US Supreme Court building. 

"Privacy is my life," Goldman says. Colleagues say her work consumes 
her. When Congress is in session, she works late into the night and on 
weekends. Five months into her first pregnancy, she favors casual, 
loose-fitting dresses. On her desk sit more than a dozen books with the 
word "privacy" somewhere in the title, not counting a five-volume set 
called The History of Private Life. The sparsely adorned walls are 
dominated by a framed, 1940s Hollywood movie poster of George Orwell's 
1984. A vintage IBM clone sits unused, keyboard unceremoniously stacked 
atop the monitor. Since her pregnancy, Goldman says she's "a little 
concerned about that VDT [radiation] thing." 

Scanning Goldman's resume and appointment calendar shows that as the 
ACLU's only full-time privacy watchdog, she has studied, given 
testimony, attended every conference, or at least meditated upon every 
major privacy issue that has passed through the halls of Congress within 
the last six years. (She admits to blocking out time to "just sit and 
think about privacy.") 

Her goal is to get protections built into legislation. While there's a 
lot of talk about privacy being built into the Constitution, "it's only 
barely there," says Jerry Berman, the Director of the Electronic 
Frontier Foundation's Washington office (Berman hired Goldman when he 
was still at the ACLU). Given that there is little privacy written into 
common law, Goldman is constantly striving to write privacy protection 
into new legislation. For the most part, she says, privacy lives in a 
series of loosely structured voluntary guidelines adopted by various 
industries, such as insurance and credit reporting companies. "I tell 
these industries we need legislation to go after the bad guys," Goldman 
says. "If the good guys in industry are already adhering to voluntary 
guidelines, I ask them 'why not make it law?'"

Everything Goldman does is aimed at building coalitions between 
industry, consumer groups, and the public. After securing a consensus 
among these disparate groups, Goldman starts hammering out a legislative 
agenda that she eventually takes to Congress. During former 
administrations, Goldman would labor through seemingly endless mark-up 
sessions on privacy bills, where "every little detail was hammered out," 
she says. Congressional committees tried to nail down the "fine points" 
of each bill. "We nit-picked over everything" during the Reagan-Bush 
years, she says. "Now there's not as much hardball as I'd like to see in 
this early stage" of a new Congress, she says.

Goldman is worried about pushing any kind of major privacy legislation 
to the floor of Congress right now, however, because she's afraid the 
Republicans will remove the strongest protection language and replace it 
with weaker language. The political winds blowing in Washington right 
now could move the President to sign weakened privacy legislation 
because "something is better than nothing," she says. "After working 
years on a bill, you don't want to accept anything less than full 
strength."

Besides lobbying Congress, Goldman often meets with companies that have 
sought her out for free advice on privacy issues. (She's quick to point 
out that the companies provide no extra fees and no consultant charges. 
Her paycheck comes every two weeks from the ACLU, everything else is 
gratis.) Sessions with company marketing executives usually take on a 
question-and-answer format. Company execs demonstrate some new product 
or service, and after taking it all in, she tells the company if she 
sees any privacy problems. "I point out to them where information needs 
protection, where they might have to give people an option to opt out of 
their database, and where people will want to be assured the information 
being presented in the product isn't going to be abused," she says.

After listening to Goldman and others, American Express now offers a 
slick package called the American Express Privacy Resource Kit. Its 
purpose is to assure customers that every time they use their American 
Express cards, the company isn't somehow secretly tracking and selling 
their personal buying habits, Goldman says.

A 1990 Harris poll on privacy found that about 79 percent of those 
interviewed were "very concerned" that some aspect of their private 
lives is threatened every day. "If an industry or government doesn't 
speak to those fears, assuring the public of their privacy, [industry or 
government] is going to lose out," Goldman says. If a business can't 
convince the consumer that privacy protections are in place, consumers 
will simply take their business elsewhere, Goldman says. "It boils down 
to the bottom line...privacy is good for business," she says. 

Goldman's current passion is building privacy legislation into the 
health-care package that will eventually come out of the White House. 
Her first move was to talk to groups of doctors, explaining to them the 
value of keeping a patient's health-care records private. She also spoke 
with several industry groups, telling them that people don't want their 
employers prying into personal health-care records. Next she talked with 
insurance companies, explaining to them that people wanted to be assured 
that their records aren't for sale and will not be available to 
prospective employers. 

After convincing these groups that they have equal stake in stronger 
privacy laws, she brought representatives from each group together in a 
single room and emerged with a legislative blueprint for protecting 
health-care records. "Anytime diverse groups come together, Congress 
takes an interest," she says.

After receiving her BA from Macalester College in St. Paul in 1979, 
Goldman took a job as a social worker helping Russian immigrants who had 
relocated to Minnesota. But funds for the program were cut, leaving her 
adrift. She decided to attend law school at Hofstra University. "I 
believed the system worked and I could help it work better," she says of 
her motivation for becoming a lawyer.

While still in law school Goldman worked on legal cases involving 
Vietnam veterans who claimed they were victims of Agent Orange, the 
infamous defoliant used to help cut back the jungles for the American 
troops. That taste of litigation whetted her appetite and after 
graduating in 1984, she signed on with the ACLU's regional office in 
Minneapolis as a litigator. 

Goldman's entire legal pedigree has been shaped within the liberal 
priesthood of the ACLU. It's where she developed the Luddite thinking, a 
kind of "Us versus Them" mentality that Goldman says is part of the 
ACLU's culture. That kind of thinking was "very appealing but not 
terribly sophisticated," she says.

Berman hired Goldman in 1986 to help carry what had become an 
overwhelming load. "A lot of people talk about privacy," Berman says, 
"but Janlori came into the job with a clear-cut passion for the work, 
knowing that legislation would be the driving force for privacy issues 
in this modern age." 

Even Goldman's adversaries have good things to say about her work. "I 
think Janlori has really become the leader of the privacy advocacy bar," 
says Ronald Plesser, a Washington lawyer with the firm of Piper & 
Marbury, who represents the Information Industry Association and other 
business clients on privacy issues. "She's tough and she's principled. I 
think everybody in the industry and in public interest groups respects 
what she says."


---------------------------------------
Brock N. Meeks is a reporter for Communications Daily, a Washington, DC-
based trade publication. 

**********************************************************************

Shack Attack 
^^^^^^^^^^^^

-- Phil Patton worries: 
The Shack seems to be getting awfully fancy.


We love it and hate it, the dependable vendor of cables and connectors, 
odd parts and whole systems, with its notoriously ugly logo and store 
design. But the Shack has played a valuable role for at least 30 years: 
a WalMart of high tech, it has dispensed the glue that holds together 
popular electronics. It is the plastic pocket protector of stores. But 
however often snickered at, Radio Shack has done more than any company - 
more than Apple or IBM - to bring the computer to your home and office.

Radio Shack's very image - mundane, unpretentious - has helped 
demystify, in succession, each new technology that comes along. It has 
combined great American traditions - a do-it-yourself attitude, gadget-
ophilia, and a disregard for overrefined nicety - in the process. The 
Shack is a little temple of the quick and dirty, the extemporaneous and 
expedient. And every Radio Shack is a kind of neat module, like a fast 
food outlet - like a piece of its own equipment, plugged into the local 
infrastructure.

Its very name inspires an instant vision of both clerk and customer: 
heavy enough to have a second chin, badly shaven, bespectacled, in a 
light-blue, short-sleeve polyester shirt and two randomly deployed 
pimples. In fact, I am that customer, you are that customer, a third of 
us each year are that customer. It's a $5 billion company - the 
McDonald's of electronics.

There are items in the case I never see anyone buy, but someone must: 
the electronic guitar tuners and lighted hand microscopes, the auto-
ignition noise suppressors and pillow speakers, the vibrating alarm 
clock, and the metal detectors old men car-speak as a "treasure recovery 
system."

A more recent addition to the inventory is a $14.95 bargain called 
Tandy's Money Machine: How Charles Tandy Built Radio Shack into the 
World's Largest Electronics Chain, by Irvin Farman, sold the way Colonel 
Sanders used to sell his autobiography - right beside the biscuits and 
gravy.

On the cover is Tandy, his head topped by either a cheap toupee or 
coiffeur that provides an amazingly convincing simulacrum thereof. 
Tandy's official story is well worth perusal for all students of 
American culture and technology; its overriding theme seems to be the 
shortsightedness of Wall Street, which failed to share Charles Tandy's 
vision. We read of Tandy's never-ending thirst for coffee and champagne, 
his chewing of cheap Panatellas, his refusal to let a heart attack slow 
him down until he died in 1978.

I always associated our local Radio Shack, out on the highway strip in 
the same sort of cinderblock building as the local barbecue shack, with 
the 1963 tune Sugar Shack by the Fireballs. The truth, as we learn from 
Farman's book, is that the name was borrowed from the "radio shacks" set 
up aboard ships in the first days of wireless. 

In 1921, a London-born Bostonian by the name of Theodore Deutschmann 
opened his first radio store, a block from the site of the Boston 
Massacre. William Halligan, one of Deutschmann's first employees and 
later the founder of Hallicrafters, suggested the name. Back then, Radio 
Shack catered to hams and radio buffs - selling batteries and tubes by 
mail and retail.

By the 1950s, the stores had multiplied and gone into the high-fidelity 
business, touting a device called the "Audio Comparator," a then-novel 
switching system that allowed the customer to mix and match components 
and speakers in the listening room. But management made a mistake: The 
stores began selling on credit and soon had a pile of uncollected 
receivables. The bank pulled the plug.

Enter Charles Tandy, whom company literature regularly describes as a 
cigar-chomping maverick. Tandy started out in his family's leather parts 
business in Ft. Worth, Texas. Restless and acquisitive, he had dabbled 
in electronics and sensed its potential. He bought the ailing chain of 
nine Radio Shack stores in 1962 and proclaimed a vision of the 
electronics boom that astounded contemporaries: a thousand stores around 
the country. He outdid himself: Today there are 6,637 Radio Shacks 
around the world. 

Tandy reduced the product line, simplified the sales process to cash and 
carry, and expanded into manufacturing. Radio Shack rode to prosperity 
on the succession of technological waves that gave us modern 
electronics. Besides Hi-Fi, Radio Shack sold CB radios (the company 
pitched the gadget as a "survival tool for the energy crunch of the 
'70s"). Tandy's own handle was "Mr. Lucky." 

Yet nothing was as surprising and now characteristic of the way Radio 
Shack took on new technologies than its approach to personal computers. 
The TRS-80, creation of a 24-year-old engineer named Steve Leininger, 
made Radio Shack as important as Apple or IBM in the popularization of 
the microcomputer. Introduced in 1978 with cassette tape storage, the 
legendary "Trash 80" sold for $600.

Soon Radio Shack had a two-month waiting list and was selling more 
computers than IBM. Bill Gates, then a programming hack with an 
operating system for sale, gave BASIC to the Shack for a flat fee. That 
was one of the last times Gates was soundly beaten in a deal.

When Radio Shack looked for a maker of monitors, its first order was for 
a mere thousand, and only RCA took the bid, offering a discontinued TV 
set stripped of tuner and sound. RCA gave the Shack two design 
esthetics: simulated wood grain or "Mercedes gray." Radio Shack opted 
for the latter, and so was born a fateful tradition: the notorious 
silver-gray color scheme.

The breakup of AT&T added do-it-yourself phone wiring to the mix - 
another whole bank of jacks, wires, and such - in their little plastic 
bags, alongside the capacitors and resistors, auto-sound tweeters and 
controls, TV-antenna clamps and 8-ohm switchers.

Always, Radio Shack had a sort of low-rent aura to it. As high tech 
associated with high style, Radio Shack persisted in gray plastics. Its 
computer monitors always showed a certain lack of sharpness and when the 
company produced graphics for its software, there was a quick-and-dirty 
look to the icons and fonts.

With its bullet-hole lettering (some '60s vision of futuristic writing), 
based, if you had to make a guess, on the imagery of the printed circuit 
board - the Radio Shack logo was a sign of dweebdom. The Shack's signage 
still sports a generic typeface in red, white, and blue - a sort of 
Perotesque approach to providing information about products and prices. 
But the Shack is still the place to go to find the device to switch your 
dish, your VCR, your cable, and get the right picture on the screen.

As Hi-Fi performance crept down in price and the buffs were forced to 
quibble over the last two percent of performance, the Shack's Realistic 
components and speakers were reviewed in the stereo magazines with a 
mixture of surprise and disdain. 

Radio Shack stereo equipment took on a certain anti-chic chic. "Whacha 
got in your system?" a buff might ask. You could pronounce the brands 
Denon and Hafler and Cerwin-Vega, then casually add "and the tuner, uh, 
Realistic." (A stereophile friend owns huge exotic Scandinavian speakers 
but knows that Radio Shack Minimus speakers are the ideal second pair. 
Exactly 71/16-inches high, the Minimus is regularly $49.95, but Shack 
fans know they go on sale twice a year for $29.95.)

It is a badly kept secret that the Shack is also a great toy store, 
where you can pick up a kid's radio with Mickey Mouse-shaped ears for 
controls, a fireman's hat with siren and light on top, and a whole range 
of remote-control cars, trucks, and monsters. When I try to compile a 
mental list of the things I've bought there over the years, the Space 
Patrol kids' walkie-talkie set is at the top, right above the TV wire-
crimping tool, and, most recently, a cable for a PC Jr./ Epson interface 
(three tries, with a very smooth exchange policy).

Appreciation of Radio Shack extends far beyond the polyester shirt set. 
A friend who served in Strategic Air Command in the days of B-58s and 
vacuum tubes once found himself without a vital piece of equipment after 
a tube failed. The Air Force spec book listed the replacement part at 
$10,000. A mound of requisition paperwork loomed before him until a 
sharp-eyed enlisted man took a look at the broken piece. Forty-five 
minutes later, he was back from Radio Shack with the replacement part, 
having saved the taxpayers about $9,990. 

Once, nursing an automobile whose electrical system suffered from an 
elusive short, I had to make my way up Interstate 95 feeding it new 
fuses every few miles. What struck me was how the highway landscape made 
the location of the next Radio Shack up the road, in the strip mall, by 
the grocery store, as predictable to me as a big bass feeding ground is 
to the experienced fisherman. 

Today, many of us Radio Shack fans are made uneasy by the new Radio 
Shack super stores and the arrival of, yes, name brands. To see Sony and 
Panasonic sharing shelf space with Tandy and Realistic is jarring. Now 
that Radio Shack owns Grid, a slick portable computer company, and has 
opened Disney-like superstores (called Incredible Universe, each several 
acres in size), we worry that the Shack seems to be getting awfully 
fancy. 

Just this May, Tandy Corp. announced four new types of stores - Radio 
Shack Express, Computer City Express, Famous Brand Electronics, and 
Energy Express Plus. Shack Express stores will be smaller versions of 
the original, which sounds fine to me (Shack Lite?). But Computer City 
and Famous Brands, well, you can guess where they're heading. And Energy 
Express, which will take the form of unmanned kiosks in major malls, 
will specialize in "name-brand, high-impulse, hard-to-find batteries," 
according to the company. I guess this is progress.

A recent Radio Shack TV commercial featured flowers, low light, and a 
general ambiance worthy of a cosmetics ad. When the familiar old logo 
came on, it seemed like an embarrassed afterthought. Pretty soon they'll 
be hiring some high-power outfit to come up with a sleek new logo. But 
it would be a shame to lose the grungy old Shack. When the next 
generation of new technologies arrive, I want to be able to say, "Oh, 
the holovision? That ol' matter transporter? Yeah, picked it up at the 
Radio Shack out on Route 23." ===


------------------------------------------------
Phil Patton is a contributing editor to Esquire. His book, Made in the 
USA, will be published in paperback this summer by Penguin.



(c) 1993 Wired magazine


