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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.
Lego now has far too many custom parts, it's a bit more like building some flat pack furniture that a chance to be creative.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
See Question 18 of http://ericharshbarger.org/lego/faq.html. A pre-emptive strike.
The height was Technics, just enough customization to build useful real world stuff without being so specific that it hamstringed you into just one thing.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
Actually, I sent it.
If you ever see a "white" person the same colour a lego model, I suggest you refer them to a doctor ASAP...
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
by selling a set with a plan to building the shape/figure on the front surely they are removing the element of innovation.
we used to get it by the box and be forced to think from day one about what we could build with it.
my civil engineering degree started with a room full of teenage would be engineers faced with huge amounts of Lego and a semi-serious challenge. whoever could build the lightest bridge out of the least bricks that would allow a 2kg train roll over it won the box of chocolates for their team. it broke the ice and got everybody talking to each other, lots of bridges collapsed in the testing zone that day.
and it got to engineers used to a career of sitting at a desk thinking about consuming chocolate.
The gray castle pictured as the first (1984) castle set is incorrect.
It should be this yellow one: http://guide.lugnet.com/set/375_2
Why do I remember this? Because I was so green with jealously as I watched my older brother assesemble the one he got for his birthday. Oooo, how I hated that castle.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Having proportions where you're roughly twice as high as you are wide and hands that rotate 360 degrees is also a little freaky.
I probably still have it (or at least my parents probably do) in a box in their storage unit.
I was at my parents' house for the holidays and my son (6) got some new Lego sets for Christmas. As he was putting them together he commented, "Dad, I'm better at building Legos than you are."
Now, I've heard some pretty insulting things in my time, but this one cut straight to the bone.
So, I walked (as calmly as I could) down to my parents' basement, found the two HUGE bins labeled "Lego," and dragged them up the stairs. I put down a blanket (so they'd be easy to spread out and clean up) and DUMPED out 15 years of disassembled creativity.
My son just stood there gawking for a few seconds. Yes, words can fail even a six-year-old. "I... I... I don't even know where to start!"
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Did you know the company actually doesn't want you to call them Legos? I think they prefer something like 'Lego bricks'. They get all uppity when it comes to trademark names. Anyway, I had a pretty good stash of Legos when I was younger. Currently my sister and I are both in our mid-thirties with two kids each, and our Legos were sitting alone in some boxes in our parent's basement. One day my dad decided that those Legos should be in the hands of his grandchildren, so he set to work. He could have just roughly split them in halves and sent them to us, but he's far too anal retentive for that. No, first he organized all the bricks by color. Now this wasn't a ridiculously large collection like some people probably have, but it's still maybe 4-5 cubic feet of Legos. Then once he had that done, the real fun began. He pulled out all the instruction sheets we'd saved and started pulling out the blocks for them. I'm not sure what he sent to my sister, but I got one big set and three smaller ones, all nicely segregated in their own little Ziploc bag. Of course that was along with the other six bags of bricks, neatly organized by color. Whether it was luck, or maybe him remembering that it was my favorite, I ended up with the Galaxy Explorer. Just a few weeks ago my 3 1/2 year old was bored, and I told him about this cool rocket ship we could build, so I pulled it out and started putting it together. The instruction booklet has all these cute little check marks next to all the pieces; my dad marking off what he'd found. Occasionally there's an 'X'; something that was missing that I needed to go find a substitute for. As it was, my finished Galaxy Explorer had some odd white plates underneath and a few other out of place bricks, but it was good enough. My son played with it every night after our youngest went to bed. (Didn't want him eating any carelessly dropped bricks.) It didn't take him long before he'd progressed to a new favorite method of play: pulling the heads off of all the minifigs and making neat little stacks of them, along with little rows of legs and torsos. I'd think there was something wrong with him, but I distinctly remember making little stacks of minifig heads myself. Much to the chagrin of my wife, I've used this as an opportunity to start buying more Lego sets, which is great, because he can't really follow directions yet, so I get to put them all together.
1:58 PM- in what time zone? sheesh.. how can I have a momment of silence, if I don't know when!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
With every new Lego set my son gets we first build the kit as per the directions. However, a few weeks later he's ripped it apart and built some completely original piece. The important thing as a parent is to encourage your child to experiment and mix-match pieces. I know some people that build the kits and then put them on a shelf - what a waste - where's the fun in that? Some of the stuff my son builds is some abstract I don't even know what it is, but so long as he's having fun and being challenged and creative - that's all that matters.
I remember being around 10 years old, and, out of sheer boredom, built a guitar, with the neck being mostly made out of technic holed beams. I used rubber bands for strings. Later revisions came with whammy bars(that only worked on one string). I took earplug(like earbud on an ipod), and taped it to the body-ends of the strings. Instant pickups. Sounded like crap, but was fun for a kid.
Then moved onto hardcore Technic projects. Helicopter innards, airplanes with working controls(one even had pitch trim using worm gears). Then I moved onto car transmissions, which would occupy me for years.
My holy grail of projects was to make a 4-speed with reverse transmission. I had it drafted on (graph)paper, but ran into some snags finally building it. Many years later I would rebuild the transmission+overdrive on a '79 Triumph Spitfire, and it was like playing with Lego again.
Ah to be a kid again and have tons of free time to complete it and build a working CVT.
I knew my free time was up when I bought a 1.5 Mindstorms set, and it sat untouched for years(still have it).
My xmas present from my mom was the 8880 super car. The be-all-end-all of realistic cars at the time from Technic. 4 wheel steering, 4 speed tranny, all wheel drive. She hid it from me in the coat closet(I never found it).
The embarassing thing about it: I was 18.
April 19th, 2011, some kids build a self-replicating automaton out of Lego. By 2015 50% of Earth's surface has been converted into Lego blocks. By 2020, they become self-aware.
I've read a lot of posts by other /.ers say that highly specialized pieces limit the creativity of Legos. While it has been a while since I played with it, I was always excited to get a "new" kind of piece that let me do something that was hard, inefficent or ghetto rigged before. (Kind of like this, I can do it in assembly, but you get a little stoked when you get a really nice, efficient, fast new API) What comes to mind was the piece that allowed you to make 45deg. roofs. It origninally came in a castle set, but I found myself re-using it in space applications.
I feel like the problem with Legos today is all the commercial tie ins, like StarWars and Spiderman. One of the greatest strengths, I feel, of the older Legos were that they were a set genre, but the unverse' story was largely untold. It was up to me, and my imagination to decide "why" the diffrent castle factions were at war. I got to experience the Galaxy exploders discover a medival civilization. I built a tyranical dragon lord who was defeated by the black knight using a futuristic laser gun found from the wreckage of a lost spacecraft.
I feel like the commercial ties "lock-in" a number of kids into highly-commercialized, pre-digested stories, where they are tempted to simply play out what they saw on TV rather than write new ones for themselves.
My wife is a teacher (first grade) and is disturbed (as am I) at how many students can't write or tell a story that doesn't include cartoon characters, and that it takes significant work to do something that we both feel came so naturally to both of us. How she does it, is that kids are not allowed to write about-or read books that feature TV or video game characters, or books made from TV/movies, in class.
I believe it is the creative play as a child that has done more for my career and personal development than anything else in my life.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
Ya, you sure put that punk ass kid in his place.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Well this is Slashdot. Given the popularity of Lego bricks amongst the slashdotters, a good slashdotting would likely brick Lego's servers.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.