Are you familiar with the Radio Shack catalog online archive? It's got full scanned catalogs of the general catalog, specialty catalogs and computer catalogs too. It's no replacement for the real thing but it is neat to go back in time and see what was new and exciting in those years gone by. I remember being so excited when new catalogs came out to see what new components were going to be available that year. The General Instruments CTS256=AL2 speech chip was a mind blower to teenage me. It was fun trying to make it work on my C-64 back then. I never got it to work but years later I built one with an RS-232 interface for general PC use. Ah, the good old days. Today's electronics are just too boring and mundane. They just don't have that old magic in them.
Anyway, here's the catalog archive if you haven't seen it before. Enojy!
I actually have a bunch of the original radio shack books and catalogs I saved over the years. It really was amazing how they would foster learning about electronics instead of selling batteries and cell phones.
They sure did a lot for me and a couple of friends that were into electronics. Between their data sheets and the Forrest Mims III engineering notebooks, I learned so much about designing and building circuits. Also the Don Lancaster CMOS Cookbook and Philips ECG parts catalogs helped me move into the digital world. Good times.
In the 80s I used to get the Dick Smith Electronics catalog (US store for the Australian electronics retail firm). Those catalogs had a section in the middle about 20 pages or so filled with component pin outs, useful formulas, tables and charts for resistance, capacitance, inductance and other common reference data. They also had some simple schematics for oscillators, op amp circuits and digital/TTL. The catalogs provided me with so much useful information that they eventually fell apart. I wish I had one now that DSE is a thing of the past as well. So much good stuff disappeared in the golden age of modern hobby electronics.
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