{"id":441,"date":"2008-03-20T21:11:33","date_gmt":"2008-03-21T02:11:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/?p=441"},"modified":"2008-04-18T13:59:23","modified_gmt":"2008-04-18T18:59:23","slug":"welcome-to-the-family-whiz-kid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/441\/welcome-to-the-family-whiz-kid","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to the Family, Whiz-Kid"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"\/wp-content\/images\/goodwill\/whizkid_large.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/wp-content\/images\/goodwill\/whizkid_small.jpg\" alt=\"VTech Talking Whiz-Kid and VTL Computron\" class=\"centered\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Yesterday afternoon, I made a trip to some local thrift stores that I hadn&#8217;t visited in eight years.  I left with a 24-game N64 cartridge drawer, some books, an unopened copy of Bill Gates&#8217; <em>The Road Ahead<\/em> on audio cassette, some neat board games, and the two devices you see above.  It&#8217;s more junk, but it&#8217;s good junk.<\/p>\n<p>The VTech Talking Whiz-Kid (1987, right) came with the box, manual, and cards.  This educational toy reads paper &#8220;program cards&#8221; as you insert them into an optical reader slot.  The cards don&#8217;t contain any software, but instead bear a simple bar code that tells the Whiz-Kid which built-in program to start.  Highlights include <em>Hangman<\/em>, word scramble, and an extremely limited calculator.<\/p>\n<p>I remember seeing the VTL Computron (1980, left) in J.C. Penney catalogs as a kid.  It works too, although it&#8217;s missing the battery door.  The LED-based Computron plays matching games based on which letter you select.  Most of the games obviously went along with a printed guidebook that I don&#8217;t have.<\/p>\n<p>Neither device does BASIC like the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/324\" target=\"_blank\">VTech Pre-Computer 1000<\/a>, but they&#8217;re both highly collectible microprocessor-powered toys.  Total cost for both? $10 (US).<\/p>\n<p>Anybody else have one of these?  Feel free to share your memories with us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday afternoon, I made a trip to some local thrift stores that I hadn&#8217;t visited in eight years. I left with a 24-game N64 cartridge drawer, some books, an unopened copy of Bill Gates&#8217; The Road Ahead on audio cassette, some neat board games, and the two devices you see above. It&#8217;s more junk, but [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,43,18,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-collecting","category-electronic-toys","category-recent-finds","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}