Aging: Going the distance like Voyager 1, Termination Shock, and crossing the heliopause boundary into interstellar space and other adventures

If The Legend of Bagger Vance and the game of golf can be considered a metaphor for life, and it, along with such golf movies as Tin Cup and Seven Days in Utopia, surely can be, then perhaps the venerable Voyager 1 space probe can be considered as being somewhat analogous to aging.

On Sept. 5, 1977, the Voyager 1 space probe launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida aboard a Titan-Centaur rocket. A 12-inch gold-plated copper disc stored aboard the probe contains greetings in 60 languages, samples of music from different cultures and eras, and natural and man-made sounds from Earth. They also contain electronic information that an advanced technological civilization could convert into diagrams and photographs.

Voyager 1’s primary mission was completed 12 years later in 1989 when it completed its planned close flybys of the Jupiter and Saturn planetary systems. Its extended Voyager Interstellar Mission objective is to extend the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) exploration of the solar system beyond the neighborhood of the outer planets to the outer limits of the Sun’s sphere of influence, and possibly beyond.

In August 2012, Voyager 1 flew beyond Termination Shock, the point where the solar wind becomes slower than the speed of sound, and crossing the heliopause boundary, and finally entering interstellar space, making it the first human-made object to explore this new territory. Its Mission Elapsed Time is now 45 years, seven months, and 22 days.

The existential point of Voyager 1 is it keeps on going. Aging is similar to that. In some ways, you move beyond the playbook but keep, by the grace of God, and genes, on going. That can be both liberating and terrifying. In a post last July (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2022/07/05/character-courage-redemption-and-some-thoughts-on-aging-gracefully-aging-well-hint-mellow-isnt-just-for-coffee-and-gratitude-really-is-an-attitude/), I wrote about aging gracefully, aging well.

“My own thoughts on aging gracefully, aging well, might be summarized thusly: Be mellow, be grateful,” I wrote two days before I knew I was going to have a cystoscopy for kidney stones at Health Sciences Centre (HSC) in Winnipeg. Perhaps it was meant as much as a 48-hour countdown clock pep talk to myself as anything. Because after the cystoscopy most of the grace I felt for the remainder of the day was fentanyl-fueled by my merciful urology surgeon, who discharged me from day surgery with an admonition to my medical escort that I not be allowed to sign any legal documents or venture into a casino for at least 24 hours. He also cautioned my medical escort that my memory would be on a five-minute fentanyl-inspired repeating question loop for the rest of the day. All in all, I’d say, doc was pretty close to the mark. On the good side, I sat obediently on a curb outside HSC in the wonderful, warm Winnipeg July sunshine, while Jeanette retrieved the vehicle from a nearby parkade. And I did this even though a beckoning lunch-hour hot dog cart was mere feet away. Later, minutes before closing time, we made our first trip together to the Polo Park shopping centre since long before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Jeanette says I raced along both the lower and upper levels of the mall at record race walking speed, compared to my often spine-challenged limp.

On the not-so-good side, I asked detailed questions of my medical escort about my urology procedure on the HSC elevator down to the ground floor. When I wasn’t satisfied with the answers I was getting, I helpfully suggested that perhaps the answers I was receiving were not adequate. Once we arrived at Grand Medicine Health Sciences Pharmacy to get a couple of prescriptions filled, I had a pleasant, albeit apparently rather loud, telephone conversation with an agent of Manitoba Blue Cross  about the summer status of my plan coverage. Later, we had a lovely dinner with Jeanette’s son, Robin, and his wife, Chelsie, on the patio of Damecca Lounge on Madison Street in Winnipeg. As the meal ended, I wandered inside without a word to anyone, leaving them to assume that I had just had to use the washroom, but instead I picked up the tab (good) but only initially inadvertently left a $0.26 tip for our more-than-competent waiter on the point-of-sale terminal he had handed to me (bad). Fortunately, I realized my faux pas (perhaps the look on his face?), and fortuitously had some paper fiat currency in my wallet to hand over also. Needless to say, I didn’t visit any casinos.

As it turned out, the summer would be much more difficult than the initial July 7 trip. Between the end of July and mid-September, I would be make six trips the Emergency Department of Thompson General Hospital – more than my previous combined total in 15 years of living in Thompson – as well as making two more road trips to Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre for more related day surgeries on July 20 and Sept. 16. In that short space of time, I had gone from being triaged as a patient to be seen sooner-than-later to the top of the provincial urology surgery list.

My trusty medical escort assures me that my loud and repeated use of the f-word all down the corridor, as I painfully walked back to our hotel room at 6 a.m. Saturday morning Sept. 17 at the Quality Inn & Suites on Pembina Highway, would have sufficed to have me tossing the guest out if I had been working the the front of desk of my own Quality Inn & Suites Thompson. The same could no doubt be attested to by three older ladies whom I shared an observation room with overnight at HSC in the preceding hours. One told a nurse making her rounds “the gentleman seems to be in quite a bit of pain,” as I stood beside my bed all night, as it was the most comfortable position of a bad lot of choices. The nurse replied, “We’ll be giving him something for the pain in a minute,” saying it with a tone suggesting a bit of silence would be a bonus for everyone, along with pain relief. 

By the end of September, I would feel fine. 

In the Knights of Columbus, our fraternal Latin motto is “tempus fugit, memento mori,” which translates in English to “time flies, remember death.” If I’m tempted to think myself above some tedious task, I usually catch myself and instead think something to the effect of,  “Thank God that I am still blessed with the physical ability and and cognitive skills to perform  do it.”

The late Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, who died in January 2022, at the age of 95, had many useful things to say over many decades of teaching on mindfulness and seemingly ordinary and mundane tasks. And while I may not know many of today’s stars who make up what passes for celebrity culture in the present zeitgeist, I am not apparently a complete Luddite, as I am activating a JK hand-me-down digital iPhone 7 Apple smartphone, after about a 15-year hiatus from my old classic black Motorola 120c analog cell phone (which went through a full wash-and-dry cycle once, maybe twice, in a side pocket of some green khaki cargo shorts.)

I haven’t subscribed to 81-year-old Moses Znaimer’s Zoomer magazine yet, but it is only April and the year is still young.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

The Internet of Things … things like ransomware and other malware, spam and phishing

 

 

A few weeks ago, I happened to capture from television for my PVR, an airing of the 1983 movie War Games, starring Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Woods and Ally Sheedy. War Games is a delightful, campy end-of-the-Cold War Ronald Reagan-era science fiction film, which didn’t seem quite so campy when I first saw it at a movie theatre in Cornwall, Ontario, the year the Soviets shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 on a scheduled flight from New York City to Seoul, after the flight deviated from its approved route and flew through prohibited airspace near Sakhalin Island at the far eastern extreme of the Soviet Union.

Perestroika and Glasnost, as it turned out, were just around the corner, but not quite yet arrived. Broderick plays David Lightman, a young computer hacker who unwittingly accesses WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), a United States military supercomputer originally programmed to predict possible outcomes of nuclear war. Lightman gets WOPR to run a nuclear war simulation, originally believing it to be a computer game. The computer, now tied into the nuclear weapons control system and unable to tell the difference between simulation and reality, attempts to start World War III.

Flash-forward 34 years from War Games to WannaCry.

WannaCry?

Yes. Not because I am one of the unfortunates with a computer infected May 12 with WannaCry, which appears a dozen years after the first documented ransomware attack happened in the United States in 2005.

Rather cry because of the State of the Internet itself in 2017. That should make anyone, Bitcoin pirates excepted, want to cry. If ever their was a swamp needing to be drained, it’s the Internet (so ubiquitous The Associated Press stopped capitalizing it last year), a tangled network that more or less runs the world from up in the Cloud somewhere, while making cyberwar on us down below through a deluge of ransomware and other malware, spam and phishing targeting our computer vulnerabilities; with the words ransomware, malware, spam and phishing so common now in the public lexicon, they no longer challenge my spellchecker and I no longer need to define them.

WannaCry, also known as Wanna Decryptor, WanaCryptor, or wcry, is a specific self-replicating multilingual ransomware type of viral worm malware program that prevents or limits users from accessing their system by encrypting all their data except for two files: instructions on what to do next and the Wanna Decryptor program itself.

It is believed to exploit a vulnerability in older and unpatched Microsoft Windows operating systems to invisibly move from computer-to-computer. And unlike many other forms of malware, it can spread on its own: it doesn’t need a human to click on a fake e-mail attachment. WannaCry uses a hacking tool called the Eternal Blue exploit, believed to have been developed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) to give American intelligence operative access to computers used by terrorists and enemy states. But a mysterious organization called Shadow Brokers, which first came to public attention last year, claimed last month it had stolen a “cyber weapon” of that description from an American spy agency, and dumped it on the Internet for all and sundry to use.

Once installed and the software is locked, WannaCry demands a US$300 ransom to be paid within six hours in Bitcoins, a digital computer cryptocurrency created in 2009 by an unknown person or persons using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto, to decrypt the files.

The ransom note indicates that the payment amount will be doubled after three days. If payment is not made after seven days, the encrypted files will be deleted. Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at the Helsinki-based cybersecurity company F-Secure, called the May 12 global attack, which has affected hundreds of thousands of files in more than 100 countries by early counts, “the biggest ransomware outbreak in history.” Bitcoins are encrypted to regulate the generation of units of currency and verify the transfer of funds in a decentralized way, operating independently of a central bank, and placing Bitcoin over the last eight years usually beyond the reach of regulatory restriction and confiscation. A single Bitcoin is worth about US$1,734, which is about $500 more than a troy ounce of gold will set you back at around US$1,230.

A decade ago, if you weren’t trolling sketchy sites, knowingly or unknowingly, and had a half-decent firewall and anti-virus program, odds were you could manoeuvre around the Internet OK, plagued by little more than some annoying, but hardly crippling, e-mail spam. Today, for this WordPress blog, I use Akismet,which bills itself as “an advanced hosted anti-spam service aimed at thwarting the underbelly of the web. It efficiently processes and analyzes masses of data from millions of sites and communities in real time. To fight the latest and dirtiest tactics embraced by the world’s most proficient spammers, it learns and evolves every single second of every single day. Because you have better things to do.” Akismet heitpfully tells me it has “protected your site from 11,379 spam comments already.”

If you were an Apple loyalist, working on a Mac, viruses were almost unheard of a decade ago, especially when compared to Microsoft Windows, first released in 1995. Apple Macintosh computer users still are less likely to be infected with a virus than Microsoft Windows users, but as Apple gains market share and Macs are used by more people, virus infections are becoming more common than they used to be.

I can almost tell you to the day in retrospect when I think the Internet “arrived.”

When I arrived at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario as a history graduate student in September 1993, the main library was still Douglas Library on University Avenue, but across the street kitty-corner to it was a massive construction project where they were building the brand-new Stauffer Library on Union Street. This was the end of the brief five-year NDP Bob Rae era in Ontario and while the economy wasn’t strictly speaking in recession, it was far from booming, so projects of such scale in places like Kingston were rare.

I remember using an Internet station in the just opened Stauffer Library the next year on one of my first visits in October 1994. The Netscape Navigator browser had just been released that same month, but Queen’s was using the NCSA Mosaic browser, released in 1993, almost the first graphical web browser ever invented. The computer services and library folks at Queen’s got it from day one to their credit. They knew this was going to be so popular with students instantly, the work stations (and there weren’t many) were designed for standing only. How many places in a university library is their no seating? Not many. But they wanted to keep people moving because there would be lineups to use the stations.

I remember reading the San Jose Mercury News online because it was in Silicon Valley and one of the very first papers in North America online. The funny thing is, the San Jose Mercury News recognized its brief moment in history and for a few years anyway punched well above its weight, doing fine investigative work, both in print and online; a small regional paper no one had ever heard of before the early 1990s unless they lived in Southern California.

But in 1994, we all knew intuitively the world had changed with the Internet and graphical web browsers. I had sent my first e-mail from Trent University in Peterborough more than three years earlier in the spring of 1991 from the Thomas J. Bata Library on their “Ivory”  server (someone in computer services seemingly had a sense of humour), and was also sitting down as I recall. That was neat, but this was on a whole other scale entirely.

That said, I’m  bit of a contrarian, and just as I was finishing up writing America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’ Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan for my master’s thesis in 20th century American history on the admission of nonimmigrants to the United States, emigration and immigration policy, and foreign relations in Latin America between 1981 and 1989, I decided I need a bit of a break from writing at odd hours in the always-chilly-even-in-summer math computer lab in the basement of Jeffery Hall, which has three floors underground and opened at Queen’s in 1969, housing the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and is named after Ralph L. Jeffery, head of Mathematics and chair of graduate studies from 1943 to 1960.

So what did I do? Well, I made a few trips that summer to nearby Sandbanks Provincial Park in Prince Edward County, Ontario’s only island county (alas now long linked across the Bay of Quinte on Lake Ontario to the mainland at Belleville by a bridge) but I also took along Clifford Stoll’s just published Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, where he discussed his ambivalence regarding the future of how the Internet will be used and suggests even then the promise of the Internet was vastly over-hyped by those with vested interests to do so. An American astronomer by trade, Stoll is best known for his pursuit of hacker Markus Hess, who broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1986, which led to Stoll’s 1989 book called The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, which I have also read. But I must confess I have not even attempted to tackle his 1980 PhD dissertation from the University of Arizona titled Polarimetry of Jupiter at Large Phase Angles, which I gather looked at cloud models and “Jupiter’s solar flux deposition profile.” Whatever that might mean.

While Stoll was wildly wrong in Silicon Snake Oil in underestimating the future of e-commerce and online news publishing, more than 20 years later the book still stands the test of time, I think, as a general cautionary tale about over-hyping the Internet and getting too carried away in our virtual enthusiasms.

Which is why the following year in 1996, as the managing editor of the pioneering Kingston Net-Times, I was, as I recall, urging my readers to follow Stoll’s suggestion to log-off the old dial-up modem mainly back then from time-to-time to bake some chocolate chip cookies (at least that’s what my memory recalls him writing) and to take in a kids’ hockey game at the local arena (my idea).

The publisher, who in all fairness, gave me great editorial latitude was a bit less holistic in his considered view. In fact, he was, truth be told, incredulous. He used the old-fashioned telephone to call me, rather than send an e-mail, and asked, “Did you really suggest people log-off?” It is possible several expletives followed in the next sentence when I assured him I had indeed. Fortunately, our online (is that irony?) readers loved the column, albeit a novel idea to most of them, and sent us e-mails to say so.

While the so-called “Internet of Things” is usually taken to mean the interconnection via the Internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data, perhaps the definition should be broadened to encompass things like ransomware and other malware, spam and phishing.

The only solution, at least how I see it, to virtual phishing may be to pull the plug and go fishing in real life.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

What ‘Cat Sherman’ has learned on Facebook

All food photos courtesy of Jeanette Kimball

While I wouldn’t quite qualify as the last Facebook holdout on the planet, I’ve been enough of a Luddite to be a contender probably.

In a way that’s odd because I haven’t approached all social media that way. I became the managing editor of the locally owned online-only and now long defunct Kingston Net-Times in November 1996. I very much doubt any of my almost 300 Facebook friends or 3,852 followers on LinkedIn were working in online media way back more than 18 years ago (just the kind of statement every good journalist knows invariably invites contradiction). I still remember our lone ad salesman trying to sell local advertising in the fall of 1996. It was a tough go given most of our potential mom-and-pop advertisers in Kingston had barely heard of the Internet at that point, although a few had dial-up modem ISP connections and a handful maybe had the brand-new high-speed cable broadband connection. Very few indeed.

The next year, I actually jumped back to print for a second tour of duty with the daily Peterborough Examiner as City Hall reporter (I had worked there from 1985 to 1989 as a court reporter). When I went back to the old Hunter Street building, Jack Marchen still had the desk facing directly across from me in the newsroom and Phil Tyson was still at the desk beside me. The arrival of the Apple iMac was still a year or so away for when we moved buildings down to The Kingsway. I understand the Examiner is now back on Hunter Street in East City. Good on them. Newspapers don’t belong in industrial wastelands, even if it is easier for deliveries. They belong downtown or at least close to it. Where reporters can actually walk their beats and encounter the people they are covering walking to the courthouse or City Hall or in a local coffee shop. Progress being progress, I worked my way up from an iMac to an eMac by the time I arrived at The Independent (which actually was independent) in Brighton, Ontario in 2004. Who remembers eMacs?

I also worked my up from being a reporter to managing editor in that time-honoured journalism tradition of the managing editor who hired me having enough of things less than three months after he hired me and never coming back from lunch one overcast November day. The publisher, knowing talent when she saw it, or at least recognizing the last remaining body in editorial, fast-tracked me to the top. Stories of journalists quitting and not coming back from lunch of course, are legion in the business. My predecessor at the Peterborough Examiner in 1985, I was told had enough by lunch on day one of his probation and never returned from lunch.

As for Facebook, my employer at the Thompson Citizen required me to set up a page on March 19, 2010 to keep an eye on things when our then general manager, Donna Wilson, a Facebook maven ahead of her time, set up a page for the paper. Since I was reluctant to do so, it wound up flying largely under the radar for years as “Cat Sherman,” named after my black cat, who would be with me for another two years. That may not have been 100 per cent in compliance with Facebook’s true identity requirements, but, hey, Facebook has a lot of fine print to read, and it wasn’t me looking to be on Facebook. When Donna decamped from the Thompson Citizen about six months after getting us on Facebook, the publisher told me the de facto job of moderating the Thompson Citizen Facebook page was going to fall to me alone, suggesting that as a journalist I should have been at the rudder solo on it from day one, rather than sharing the job with the general manager whose idea it was.

Ironically, the Thompson Citizen wound up leaving Facebook amidst national headlines in January 2013, after problems with racist comments in relation to aboriginal issues. While many of our colleagues in the media, not to mention academics and human rights officials, publicly applauded us for the principled stand we took, we noticed no one, at least to my knowledge, followed us in our very public pledge, by the publisher, general manager and myself, to permanently have the Thompson Citizen leave Facebook. If you are interested in what happened and the rationale behind the decision, you can read the editorial I penned on behalf of the paper on Jan. 30, 2013 headlined, “Racist anti-aboriginal slurs and offensive comments prompt Thompson Citizen to permanently close Facebook page” at: http://www.thompsoncitizen.net/news/thompson/racist-anti-aboriginal-slurs-and-offensive-comments-prompt-thompson-citizen-to-permanently-close-facebook-page-1.1372321

The Wednesday Thompson Citizen and Friday Nickel Belt News are owned by GVIC Communications Corp. of Vancouver’s Glacier Media Group. They are one of the few, if not the only, Glacier newspaper, not on Facebook in 2015. Perhaps that is just as well if you read my Feb. 11 post “Louis Riel: 21st century hero to the Métis of Manitoba; Rogers Hometown Hockey tour set to roll into Thompson, Manitoba’s hockey hotbed” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/02/11/louis-riel-21st-century-hero-to-the-metis-of-manitoba-rogers-hometown-hockey-tour-set-to-roll-into-thompson-manitobas-hockey-hotbed/ and then take a glance at their weekly Thompson Citizen POLL question, which is into its third week up online: “Was racism the reason for the violence in the stands at the midget AA Thompson King Miners game last Sunday, as some have alleged?”

• Yes.
• No.
• It played a role, but it wasn’t the only factor.

As of this morning, as I write this, 49 per cent of the 63 Thompson Citizen readers who responded to the poll were saying racism wasn’t the reason for the violence: http://www.thompsoncitizen.net/thompson-citizen-7.23996?ot=gmg.PopupPageLayout.ot&showResult=true, with the helpful disclaimer, “This is not a scientific poll,” lest readers be inclined perhaps to think it might be.

Needless to say, with the Thompson Citizen no longer on Facebook as of Jan. 30, 2013, “Cat Sherman” had little that he needed to do. Somehow about 20 people back in 2010 had figured out his true identity and requested to be his “friend” and that’s where things sat until late last year when I decided since I was no longer editor of the paper, it might be time to revisit the whole Facebook issue, at least in terms of a personal page. So Cat Sherman got friendlier than he had been in the previous four years and accepted about 10 long-pending Facebook requests that had been hanging out there in virtual limbo forever. I think it quite likely that when I finally accepted the friend requests the requestors very likely had long forgotten they had ever made them in the first place and wondered how they had got a new friend called Cat Sherman.

And then being a good Facebook citizen, Cat Sherman changed his name to his true identity on Feb. 14. And what did I learn? At least so far. Well, I like to think I write a fairly interesting, if admittedly eclectic and maybe even eccentric, blog at times at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/ On its best day ever last Oct. 4, a month after it started, a story called, “The hauntings of October: Three Thompson unsolved murders: Kerrie Ann Brown, Bernie Carlson and Christopher Ponask” https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/10/03/the-hauntings-of-october-three-thompson-unsolved-murders-kerrie-ann-brown-bernie-carlson-and-christopher-ponask/ had 5,113 “views” the day after it was posted. It’s now been looked at more than 11,000 times.

But while people do link to the blog through Facebook, sure, what they are really interested in, because they are your friends and family, after all, is your holiday pics. People love photos.  While I like to think my latest prose on eschatology demands interest on its own merits, my friends want to know where the last photo from holidays was taken. And they readily “like” and often “comment” on photos on Facebook. Instantly. Really.

Perhaps my next Facebook post, or at least one sooner than later, should be on the cuisine and foodstuff we sampled on a gastronomical odyssey through Île du Cap aux Meules in Quebec’s  Magdalen Islands, or Îles-de-la-Madelaine, a small archipelago in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence? Maybe even a taste of it right here with some dessert photos? Jeanette has assured me for years, if there is one thing friends on Facebook like as well ,or even more than vacation photos, it is pics of food. And if you combine food with holidays on Facebook, well, really, who needs prose anyway, eh? Bon appétit.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

End of an era for gadget and gizmo DIYers as RadioShack to file for bankruptcy

I still remember trying to build my first crystal radio set as a kid. Or should I say more truthfully watching my dad build it for the most part. A crystal radio set is a simple radio receiver, popular in the early days of radio. It needs no other power source but that received solely from the power of radio waves received by a wire antenna.  All you need are a few a few inexpensive parts, such as a coil of copper wire for adjustment, a capacitor, a crystal detector, and earphones. Crystal radio sets are are distinct from ordinary radios as they are passive receivers, while other radios use a separate source of electric power such as Alternating Current (AC) wall power electricity or Direct Current (DC) battery power to name a couple.

Crystal radios can be designed to receive almost any radio frequency band, but most receive the amplitude modulation (AM) broadcast band, although some receive the 49-meter international shortwave band.

It wasn’t so much that as a kid I was what would today be known as a member of the “maker community” or DIYer (Do it yourselfer) or tinkerer (a word we did have back in the 1960s and 1970s). No, it was more my Uncle Ab (Abner Barker), my dad’s older brother, who was an electrician and lived in St. Catharines, Ontario when I was growing up in Oshawa. Uncle Ab didn’t visit often but when he did arrive for a few days now and then, he’d do things like bring me a radio or my first-copy of Popular Electronics magazine, a publication for electronics hobbyists and experimenters published from October 1954 until December 1999. Uncle Ab was such an enthusiast himself he seemed willing to overlook that even when interested his nephew had … err … a very limited aptitude for mathematics, physics or any other applied science that might have proved useful for an electronics hobbyist to possess.

Some may also recall Heathkit, the brand name of electronic test equipment, high fidelity home audio equipment, television receivers, amateur radio equipment, robots, electronic ignition conversion modules for early model cars with point style ignitions and other kits and electronic products produced and marketed for assembly by the purchaser by the Heath Company of Chicago from 1947 until 1992.

Edward Bayard Heath, an early monoplane pilot and aircraft engineer, had founded the company in 1926, after purchasing the Chicago based Bates Aeroplane in 1912, and then going on to found the E.B. Heath Aerial Vehicle Co., which later becoming the Heath Airplane Company.

I hadn’t thought about building crystal radio sets for years. Or Heathkit. Just like I hadn’t thought about RadioShack for years. Not until I stumbled upon a  Feb. 2 news story yesterday from Bloomberg Business that  RadioShack, founded in 1921  as a mail-order retailer for amateur ham-radio operators and maritime communications officers on Brattle Street in Boston by two London-born brothers, Theodore and Milton Deutschmann, who named the company after the compartment that housed the wireless equipment for ham radios, is about to declare bankruptcy. Circuit City bought the stores formerly known as RadioShack in Canada in 2004, re-branding them as The Source by Circuit City. In 2009, Circuit City’s U.S. parent company filed for bankruptcy protection and BCE Inc. bought the stores, re branding them once again as The Source. There is a store here in Thompson, Manitoba in City Centre Mall.

Bloomberg Business reported that RadioShack has lost $936 million since the fourth quarter of 2011, the last time it was in the black, and its shares have lost 99.6 percent of their value since peaking 15 years ago. On Feb. 2, the New York Stock Exchange said it had suspended trading on the stock and started the process of delisting it.

RadioShack has been based in Fort Worth, Texas since 1963 when Charles Tandy, who ran a successful nice market chain of leather stores, acquired the struggling-then chain of what was nine RadioShack retail stores in Boston and area, for about $300,000 as a favour to its major creditor, First National Bank of Boston.

From the early 1960s until the early 1990s, RadioShack, with its own private brand manufactured accessories, batteries, transistors and capacitors, had plenty of success going after customers “looking to save money by buying cheaper goods and improving them through modifications and accessorizing,” writes Joshua Brustein, referencing Irvin Farman’s 1993 book, Tandy’s Money Machine: How Charles Tandy Built RadioShack Into the World’s Largest Electronics Chain, in his Feb. 2 Bloomberg Business story, “Inside RadioShack’s Slow-Motion Collapse.” The target audience was people who needed one small piece of equipment every week.”

And then in November 1977, in its boldest move, Tandy had RadioShack launch the TRS-80, one of the first mass-market personal computers with about 16K of memory and a 12-inch-square monitor with one shade of gray characters and no graphics, using software designed by a still obscure start-up named Microsoft, founded 2½ years earlier in April 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

Why bold? There was no known market for personal computers in 1977. With a $600 price tag it was going to be the most expensive product RadioShack had ever sold. Tandy mused about the initial order of 1,000 TRS-80 units that his RadioShack stores could always use them for inventory management if customers weren’t interested in buying them. However, in its early years, the TRS-80 was more popular than Apple’s computers.

Early last year, Steve Cichon, a writer for the website Trending Buffalo, sifted through the back page of the front section of the Saturday, Feb. 16, 1991 Buffalo News with a RadioShack ad for items such as  voice recorders, GPS devices, answering machines and camcorders that RadioShack was selling 24 years ago. Cichon found that his iPhone had cancelled out any need for 13 of the 15 products then being sold by RadioShack, which had a combined listed advertised price of $3,054.82 in 1991. That amount is roughly equivalent to about $5,100 in 2012 dollars,” Cichon wrote in his Jan. 14, 2014 post, adding, “The only two items on the page that my phone really can’t replace: Tiny Dual-Superhet Radar Detector, $79.95. But when is the last time you heard the term ‘fuzzbuster’ anyway?” and the “3-Way speaker with massive 15″ Woofer, $149.95.”

Near the end, RadioShack was showing signs it was becoming self-aware of its stuck-in-the-past image problem, witness this 1:12 YouTube video from an ad they did for the 2014 Super Bowl, which is pretty  priceless, if too little too late. Clerk number one answers the phone and says to clerk number two: “The 80’s called. They want their store back,” featuring the spot-on perfect music of Canadian rockers Loverboy’s 1981 anthem Working for the Weekend blaring in the background. If you can honestly say you danced on the roof of one of your Loyalist College print journalism classmate’s orange Toyota Corolla at Lake on the Mountain, just outside Picton, Ontario, to the tune in 1981 and she still remembered the incident with some fondness, if continuing disbelief, almost 30 years later, it probably helps. You can catch the RadioShack 2014 Super Bowl ad on YouTube here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpkixVDFpcI

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