Kids’ Computers Through The Ages
June 27th, 2011 by Benj Edwards
Today at PCWorld.com, you’ll find my new retrospective of kids’ computers through history. It covers a selection of toy/educational/kid computers from the dawn of computing to the present via the cyber-magic of the web slideshow medium. I hope you enjoy it.
June 27th, 2011 at 12:07 pm
Whoa, the Tiger Learning Computer looks pretty cool…
June 27th, 2011 at 12:09 pm
That kid’s mom looks she’s secretly plotting against him. A fake smile and a cool new toy so that he doesn’t suspect the POISON IN HIS DINNER
June 27th, 2011 at 2:54 pm
Does anyone remember the Hot Wheels and Barbie Computers? I believe it was a 200MHz computer with a Hot Wheels or Barbie case. If I remember correctly the computer was pretty well out of date when it arrived, but the case for the Hot Wheels version was pretty cool. I remember wanting just the case and the keyboard so that I could upgrade the insides. Here is a picture: http://www.applefritter.com/files/Picture%20005.jpg
June 28th, 2011 at 6:18 am
Eagles409, I remember them — we did a Retro Scan of the Week of those Barbie & Hot Wheels Computers last year:
http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/628
I didn’t include them in the slideshow because I was focusing mainly on educational computers that weren’t’ full-fledged PCs.
June 28th, 2011 at 10:58 pm
Gahh…I had that RadioShack “computer”. I wish i had took a photo of that thing. My parents gave it to me in 1987 for Christmas and I played with it until I burned out a few of the bulbs.
The last thing I made with it was a calculator, but I could only get it to do up 10 (ie 4+6) because I ran out of wires =)
June 29th, 2011 at 4:21 am
wish they still make these toy-computers with BASIC or any programming language built in and capability to store those software.
imagine all the homebrew softwares that will follow next.
October 12th, 2023 at 7:02 pm
The article has moved to a new location here:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/485677/kidscomputers.html