It's like a Transformer on your wrist.

I don't remember where this watch came from. Maybe my parents bought it for my brother before me. Maybe I begged for it when I saw it at a local Revco drug store (as I did with many toys back then). What I do know is that I played with it as a three-year-old kid, and I was completely distraught when I lost part of it in my back yard.

You see, this digital watch isn't just a watch — it's a transforming humanoid robot. The center piece detaches from the wrist strap and unfolds into a tiny robot man. It was first sold in 1984 by Takara, the company responsible for originating the popular Transformers toy line in Japan. At some point I lost the robot part of my watch, and I figured I would never see it again.

A few years later, my mom stepped in from the back yard and presented a dirty piece of plastic in her soil-stained hands. Joy swelled in my heart as I recognized what she had found while digging in her garden bed: my missing robot watch.

It was dirty, of course, and the clock portion no longer worked due to years of weather exposure, but I was still ecstatic. If you ever lost a favorite toy as a child, you know how painful it is. Rarely does one ever find such a missing toy again. This was the one that came back, the one small victory for lost toys everywhere. That tiny hole in my heart, the one left vacant by my missing robot buddy, had been filled.

Ironically, I probably just put the watch in a box and forgot about it. Decades passed. While looking through some childhood knickknacks recently, I found it again and thought you might enjoy the story. It still feels good to know, as I hold this toy watch in my hands, that not all things we lose are gone forever.

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Discussion Topic of the Week: What's the coolest digital watch you've ever owned? Did you ever own a robot or game watch?

Gather 'round the fire, kids, and let me tell you about some cool robotic toys from the 1980s. On second thought, just look at this slideshow instead.

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.

Bloop bloop bleep bleep bloop bleep bloop

While cleaning out my garage the other day (as I do periodically to make room for new stuff), I came upon the family Big Trak, which my father bought for my brother and me at a flea market in the early 1980s.

In case you didn't know, the Big Trak was an electronic toy tank that one could program to perform certain movements in a sequence. At its heart lay the famous Texas-Instruments TMS1000 microcontroller. While the user typed in commands on the keypad seen above, the Big Trak emitted an array of wonderful synthesized beeps and bloops that still give me warm and fuzzy feelings when I hear them today.

Like many of the flea market toys my brother and I received back then, our Big Trak arrived with a broken front axle and a missing battery door cover. My dad would purposely buy broken electronics for very cheap and fix them up for us. And so he did with the Big Trak. The gadget provided many hours of entertainment for us as it traversed our living room's shag carpeting time and time again.

After about 10 years of rough play and 20 years of improper storage, my Big Trak was in pretty terrible shape when I came upon it recently. It was time to put the Big fella to rest, so I pulled out this keypad just before saying a final farewell to our old family friend.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What's your favorite electronic (non video-game) toy of all time?

Every once and a while, I receive emails from people looking for a certain game, electronic toy, or computer from their distant past. I then pass it on to intrepid VC&G readers to crack the case.

The Clues

Matt writes:

Hey dude,

I've been stumped in my attempts to locate info on a toy I had in the early/mid 80s.

It was pretty big and took a slew of D cell batteries. It had a surface with touch receptors on it, probably 10″ square (no LCD of any sort though). An activity consisted of a plastic CD style disc that you inserted into a slot on the side, and a plastic overlay that you put on the touch surface. The plastic overlay indicated things you could touch to make the activity/game happen. All games had very lifelike sound that came from a built in speaker.

Any help would be appreciated, I've had zero luck even coming up with a clue on this one!

-Matt

The Search Begins

It's up to you to find the object of Matt's fuzzy memory. Post any thoughts or suggestions in the comments section below. Matt will be monitoring the comments, so if you need to clarify something with him, ask away. Good luck!

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Have a memory of a computer, video game, computer software, or electronic toy you need help identifying? Send me an email describing your memories in detail. Hopefully, the collective genius of the VC&G readership can help solve your mystery.

"Play slots anywhere you go without the expense!"

I believe I bought this Radio Shack LCD Mini Slot Machine unit at a hamfest back in the 1990s. The game broke not too long afterward, but I apparently kept the box and the manual.

Fast forward 15 years later. I recently discovered the box in a pile of my old stuff at my parents' house. After flattening the box, I scanned the whole thing so you can create your own tiny three dimensional reproductions of it at home (if you're into that Radio Shack diehard papercraft thing). Heck, fill a whole room with them and dive in!

Discussion Topic of the Week: Did you (or do you) ever own any Radio Shack electronic games? Which ones?

Every once and a while, I receive emails from people looking for a certain game, electronic toy, or computer from their distant past. I then pass it on to intrepid VC&G readers to crack the case.

The Clues

Pseudo3D writes:

Hello. While reading about the Sega Pico on another website, I suddenly had a flashback to a toy I used to have a long time ago. I'm going to describe it in the best detail I can…

It was a yellow toy made by Texas Instruments (96% sure), all yellow (logo was in blue). It was larger than a modern TI graphing calculator or an original Game Boy, and also had a handle. Anyway, it consisted of an LCD screen (like a calculator would have), the mascot (I guess) was a grinning triangle man. To run the "games", you inserted a card into the front, which was a flimsy-looking touch-sensitive surface. The cards were made of paper and had a colored border on one side. The games were relatively simple. One was a simple calculator card, one had this Simon-like memory game…I'd say there were about 20 or so cards (I think they were two-sided). Unfortunately, when I google Texas Instruments toys, all I get is Speak & Spell (and its variants) and two more things that were definitely not it. Can you help?

The Search Begins

It's up to you to find the object of Pseudo3D's fuzzy memory. Post any thoughts or suggestions in the comments section below. Pseudo3D will be monitoring the comments, so if you need to clarify something with him, ask away. Good luck!

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Have a memory of a computer, video game, computer software, or electronic toy you need help identifying? Send me an email describing your memories in detail. Hopefully, the collective genius of the VC&G readership can help solve your mystery.

The time? Half-past dagger.

Does anybody know more about this interesting looking watch? I don't recall seeing or hearing anything about it beyond this tiny profile in Popular Science's "What's New" section back in 1995.

Casio's Infraceptor watch functions as a game machine, a phone book, an infrared message sender, and a stopwatch. Its IR beam lets you play a "dungeons and demons" adventure against other Infraceptor users. You prepare the phone book information — for as many as ten people — or canned questions and replies for the message-sending function on a JD-6000 Digital Diary before storing it in the watch. Price: $100.

I wonder how the so-called "dungeons and demons" game worked. I'm completely guessing here, but I suspect it wasn't very fun. It's still a neat concept that I would have killed for as a kid (I can imagine surreptitiously playing it at school).

Check out this neat Japanese page with pictures of other super-nerdy watches on it.

Discussion topic of the week: Tell us about the geekiest watch you've ever owned. (i.e. Calculator? Digital address book? Built-in camera? Dick Tracy-style radio?)

Thirty years ago last June, Texas Instruments introduced Speak & Spell at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. This electronic spelling teacher for kids broke new ground by speaking out words via built-in voice synthesis — a world-first for a consumer product.

By Christmas 1978, the iconic orange and yellow device hit stores with a suggested retail price of $50 (US). TI's new toy sold very well and became a media sensation, landing on magazine covers and eventually making an appearance as a key prop in a major Hollywood film, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

Intending to write an article about Speak & Spell's 30th anniversary last July, I conducted an email interview with Richard Wiggins, a member of the original Speak & Spell development team. Wiggins is notable for co-designing speech synthesis techniques capable of being mass-produced in an inexpensive consumer product, which was no minor task in 1978.

I wanted to share my interview with Mr. Wiggins before the year is out, as it's not only more relevant during 2008, but it also might be of interest to historians some day. In the mean time, I hope you enjoy reading it.

[ Continue reading VC&G Interview: 30 Years Later, Richard Wiggins Talks Speak & Spell Development » ]

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The promise of the Game Boy could never have been made more clear than in this 1993 ad by Hudson. Confined to your room? No problem; play your Game Boy. The portable nature of Nintendo's first handheld console opened up incredible new possibilities for how and where you could play video games.

Those possibilities felt very real when I finally convinced my dad to buy me a used Game Boy around 1990. (Sure, it had just come out in 1989, but it felt like forever because I was begging my parents for one all along the way.) With the Game Boy, I could play video games in the car, in school (although I never did), in bed at night, and I even remember wandering through the local art museum — black Game Boy earbuds in place — glued to Tetris instead of paying attention to the paintings. Oh, that glorious stereo sound. Those were amazing days indeed.

Discussion topic of the week: What was the first handheld electronic game you ever played? Also, feel free to share your first Game Boy experience.

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