I remember my first trip to Radio Shack. It would have been in the early 1970s, perhaps around 1973 or so, and I bicycled for miles to get to the store in the same strip mall as the new Wal-Mart.

Inside was Geek Heaven.

I was toying at the time with becoming a radio “ham,” which would realistically have been impossible given the cost and my financial condition, but I did like playing with all things electronic. I spent some money — actually, a lot for me at the time — on a breadboard shortwave radio kit and a few electronic tools, went home, soldered everything together, ran a bare wire antenna across the entire length of the roof of my house (I’m not sure my parents knew that) and turned the thing on.

The world streamed in.

Now, you have to understand what mass media was like in that era: There was no Internet, cable TV consisted of a dozen channels (and a lot of cities didn’t have it yet), broadcast stations and newspapers were locally owned, and for me, the nearest big city seemed an ocean away. I could tell you about barrows and gilts because Johnny Muessig quoted auction prices every morning on KWOS, but I couldn’t offer much detail about life 100 miles from me. That’s just the way it was for almost everyone.

And I’d flip on little kit radio and suddenly could listen to the BB goddamn C through a crystal earpiece. I couldn’t believe it, or all of the Morse code I’d hear from radio amateurs, or the atomic clock broadcast, or Mexican border radio or the Voice of America from everywhere. Suddenly, the little-known and wildly exotic Outside World was flowing into my house.

Every once in a while, when I scraped up the cash, I’d go back to the Radio Shack and buy more tween toys: Better radio kits, electronic parts, wire, Science Fair kits and so on. But as time went on, my interest faded a bit. My math non-skills meant I was never going to be an engineer, so in high school, I decided to focus on writing and head down the journalism path.

And as that happened, I visited Radio Shack less often. Sure, it was a good place to pick up parts, but I discovered that the same parts via mail order were cheaper. And when the Web came along as a purchasing vehicle, I found that the same parts were way cheaper — often half the price of the Radio Shack equivalents for the same level of quality.

I suspect that this tale, writ large, is the story of the failure of Radio Shack. It filed for bankruptcy Thursday; at least half of its stores are going to disappear and I am not optimistic about what will remain. For one thing, people rarely buy electronic parts any more — we are a replacement society now, not a repair society. And Radio Shack has always struggled to be price-competitive when it comes to selling actual goods.

There’s a Radio Shack right down the street from my office. I think I’ll take a stroll through there while I can. It’s probably going to go away soon.