Last Updated on April 4, 2026 by Dave Farquhar
The Radio Shack Armatron was a toy robotic arm manufactured by Tomy, the Japanese toy maker, and imported and sold at Radio Shack stores from 1984 to 1991 and again in 1994. It was a robotic arm that you controlled with joysticks and it came with game pieces so you could make a game of trying to pick up objects and perform simple tasks.
Robots and the 1980s
Robotic toys weren’t exactly something new in the 1980s. But a combination of factors happened in the 1980s to create a golden age of robotic toys. The Star Wars movies featured robots prominently in their story line. But I think the comedy Short Circuit, which was all about a robot, did even more to capture the public’s imagination. Robots were heavy on everyone’s mind at the time anyway. The classic business book The Goal, originally published in 1984, speaks specifically about robots as an example of chasing technology for technology’s sake and losing sight of what the business is trying to do.
While all of this was happening, there was a computer revolution going on. Computers were getting smaller and cheaper every year. Radio Shack’s own portable TRS-80 Model 100 was a perfect example.
The idea that you could get a real robot at Radio Shack for less than $100 seemed believable. It wasn’t true. But we wanted it to be.
The Armatron was really part of a line of products. Tomy also made remote controlled robot toys that could carry drinks or do other simple tasks. What seemed cooler, those robots, or the Armatron, depended on what you wanted a robot to be able to do.
And selling computers and electronic toys was part of Radio Shack’s secret of emerging from near bankruptcy to becoming a retail empire.
Types of Radio Shack Armatron
Radio Shack cataloged several different types of the Armatron, both with their own branding and co-branded with Tomy. The so-called mobile Armatron wasn’t very mobile, but it operated with a wired remote control and a d-pad rather than a pair of integrated joysticks. The Super Armatron from 1994 doesn’t seem like it was any more super than the original version, so I think giving it the superlative after a brief hiatus was more of a marketing gimmick than anything else.
Every kid I knew talked about the Armatron, but I only knew one who had one. He was a few years older than me, and he seemed to have one of everything Radio Shack sold. Including the coveted Armatron. I begged him to let me see it, and he always insisted it was a waste of time. But finally, one day he relented.
And he was right. It was kind of neat at first watching the arm move in response to how you moved the joysticks, but it was really hard to remember the controls. Not only that, the movement was a little bit sloppy.
It was a bit frustrating trying to pick something up with it the first time. If you were patient enough to persevere, getting it to work and do something did give you a bit of a thrill, but it wasn’t long before you got bored with picking up cones and moving them over to the other side of the table and setting them back down.
Connecting an Armatron to a computer
A letter in the March 1984 issue of Run magazine asked if anyone knew how to connect an Armatron to a computer. This caught my interest. Maybe controlling it with a computer would be more fun. But the reply dashed my hopes again. The editor replied that the Armatron wasn’t designed to be connected to a computer.
Several years later, I got my hands on a pile of back issues of another magazine: The Transactor. The January 1987 issue of Transactor had an article that went into great detail about how to modify the Armatron so that you could connect it to a Commodore VIC-20 and control it. It was credited to three people, Rolf A. Deininger, Kevin O’Connor, and Tom K. Collopy. The byline noted they were affiliated with the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. As best I can tell, Deininger was an engineering professor and O’Connor and Collopy were two of his students.
In addition to discussing the required modifications and interfacing it to the computer, they provided a pair of programs to control it.
An article in the May 1987 issue of Radio Electronics by Jim Barbarello showed how to adapt the Mobile Armatron to the Commodore 64. Earlier, in the January 1985 issue of Hot Coco, Barbarello showed how to interface the Armatron to Radio Shack’s own Color Computer. That’s appropriate.
I wouldn’t recommend carrying out any of these projects with a pristine Armatron today. But broken examples sell for around $15. Since the electrical components are much more likely to have failed then the mechanical components, it seems your odds would be pretty good of being able to attach a robot arm to a CoCo, C-64, or VIC-20.
Success of the Armatron
Radio Shack sold the Armatron for about 7 years, normally pricing it at $32, and putting it on sale for $30 during the holidays. But by 1990 or 1991, the shine had worn off robot toys. And the Super Armatron, when it was released in 1994, didn’t prove to be a super seller. I couldn’t find any advertising for it the following year.
Collecting 1980s robot toys is a popular hobby. And you sometimes see a Tomy robot parked next to someone’s retro computer setup in a photo they share on social media or a forum, or in a YouTube video. But the robot is almost always stationary.
So as much as I’d like to call the Radio Shack Armatron a classic toy of the 1980s, it really was more fun imagining what it could do than actually seeing what it could do.
Circa 2015, I was in my old neighborhood for some reason. I don’t get back there very often, but I drove down my old street partly out of curiosity, and partly just to see if I could even find it again. My neighbor’s house, the one who had the Armatron and all the other Radio Shack toys, was overgrown and looked abandoned. It made me wonder what happened to them, although so many decades have passed, it’s entirely possible they’d been long gone and it was a subsequent owner who abandoned it.
But it’s a reminder that life is finite. Rolf A. Deininger, the University of Michigan professor helped unlock the secret of connecting the Armatron to the VIC 20, died in 2013. His coauthors, presuming they were in their early 20s when they wrote the article, are probably in their late 50s by now.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.