Growing up as a geeky teenager in the 1980s I fondly remember the “Tandy Battery club” from that era – a loss-leader from the Tandy (UK) or Radio Shack (US) chain that allowed customers to claim 1 free red “Radio Shack” branded battery every month. Obviously hoping that once in the store you would be tempted to buy something else… the free batteries were just standard zinc-carbon types, nothing fancy, but most of my battery operated kit back then (Walkmans, condenser mics, ghetto blasters) were powered at some time or other thanks to Tandy’s marketing budget 🙂
And as testament to this I recently dug out from storage an old “Realistic” branded phono stereo pre-amp from that same era and lo-and-behold it still had a (rusted to bits) Radio Shack PP3 9V battery in it…
The memory of the Tandy battery club came to me the other day as I was contemplating these 3 power banks sitting on my workbench, each one has around 90Wh of energy and I started thinking about the free AA cells from Tandy, each one with probably 2Wh of energy at best…
Another Tandy/Radio Shack/Realistic gem from around the same era – the cassette tape head-cleaner & de-magnetizer[sic] – a fibrous material tape instead of the usual magnetically coated polyester-type plastic film (magnetic tape) and a wheel with a magnet (the white/red circle that can be seen through the clear plastic window in the cassette case) that is driven by the tape – on FF/REW the white/red wheel would rotate (in theory fast enough) to act as a de-gaussing field generator for the cassette player’s playback head.
Room 7609 