Tandy (formerly Radio Shack and now Radio Shack again) was my first job after college, as long as you don't count a 6-week stint at a local clone shop in College Station to prevent going broke while job-searching. Tandy had a rather interesting layout. Tandy was (and still is for a couple more years) headquartered in Tandy Center, two 13-story towers with a mall between 'em. There's only executive and bank parking next to the building, so the employee parking was two blocks away in a large piece of bottom-land next to the Trinity River. To get folks to and from the parking lot, Tandy had what they proudly boasted was the only privately-owned subway in the world (also, the shortest, going only 1,400 feet). Every morning, eager young programmer-types such as myself would board the subway (usually stop 3 next to Henderson Street for me) and take the 5-minute ride to the center. It was a fairly run-down affair, but it was really quite convenient because it was the only plentiful free parking in downtown Fort Worth. Other folks, like my wife during a brief stint at the FW city engineering offices, had to pay for monthly parking in a nearby garage.
Anyway, all good things must come to an end. I quit Tandy at the beginning of 1992 for a couple of ill-fated contracting jobs. The Deskmate for Windows project eventually did make it out of the door but was fairly big flop. Then Tandy sold off their entire computer operation to AST, which proceeded to inexplicably keep the project open for another year or so before firing everyone and going out of business themselves.
Tandy (err, Radio Shack) itself is moving out of the towers too. The mall between the towers is gonna be taken down so that they can reconnect second street to itself (ahh, remember the days when you could just build a mall in the middle of a street in the name of progress?). The towers are gonna be made into condos and rental-offices. Tandy bought out some housing projects overlooking the parking lot and are dropping 'em to build a fancy Microsoft-ish campus there. The parking lot bottom-land is gonna be flooded in a year or so and will become a small lake surrounded by Tandy's campus and some very high-dollar housing.
Ironically, my latest games are now available in a lot of Radio Shacks, so I've come full-circle :)
Oh, and there are people who think that San Francisco or Austin or Boston are the nerdiest places in the world. They're all wrong. It's Fort Worth, Texas. What other town has a statue of the founder of Radio Shack in front of the city hall?
