I learned to program in the early 1980s by playing with a TRS-80 floor model for an hour or two at a time while my mom shopped elsewhere in the mall. My first program animated a sine wave in BASIC by printing a single character one line at a time, and letting the lines scroll up the screen. I would've loved to own one of those computers, but my dad refused to buy one because he said it would be too tempting for me. He didn't even want me to have a hand calculator, and gave me his old slide rules instead (which were fun - not complaining!). I didn't have unfettered access to computers until I went to college a few years later.

I never made a big purchase at RS, but I always appreciated that I could pop in for electronic sundries as needed over the years. My opinion of them started to go south about a decade ago when they began insisting that they needed to know my zipcode every time I bought something. That was very fishy and heralded their sad decline, I think.

RS has been obsolete for years and I really don't know how they've managed to stay in business this long, but I'll miss the name when it's gone.