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LEGO Brick 50th Anniversary
An anonymous reader writes "'The LEGO brick turns 50 at exactly 1:58pm today. This cool timeline shows these fifty years of building frenzy by happy kids and kids-at-heart, all the milestones from the Legoland themed sets to Technic and Mindstorms NXT, as well as all kind of weird curiosities about the most famous stud-and-tube couple system in the world.'" Of course, it all peaked in 1979 with the space set. These kids these days with their bionacle. bah.
See Question 18 of http://ericharshbarger.org/lego/faq.html. A pre-emptive strike.
Real geeks use Fischer-Technik. They had a full array of boolean logic blocks (at truly outrageous prices) in the early 80's, and robot kits, pneumatics, remote control, etc, long before Lego ever got around to doing such stuff. And who needs colors, anyway ? Grey and red is colorful enough.
The Technic range is still going strong, with (still) a good mixture of custom elements and lots of generic bricks and beams.
There's been something of a renaissance in the last few years, what with the modular Cafe Corner (which has a whole blog devoted to it) and the creator houses. Not to mention lego's official 3d modeller which links in to their ordering system - design a model and they'll ship you all the parts for it in a custom box with a picture of your model on the front.