Radio Shack catalogs were basically the cheat codes for every tech-obsessed kid and hobbyist from the late ‘70s through the early 2000s. Dropping yearly like clockwork, these thick, phone-book-sized guides were packed with everything—TRS-80 computers in the early ‘80s, clunky cordless phones in the ‘90s, and every battery, resistor, and remote-controlled car you didn’t know you needed. The 1985 catalog hyped the first affordable portable computers, the ‘90s issues pivoted hard into realistic mobile phones and stereo systems, and by the early 2000s, they were showing off MP3 players and early digital cameras. If you flipped through one, you weren’t just shopping—you were time-traveling through the evolution of consumer tech.