My favourite toy when I was a kid:
The English Channel. As a kid, by this time of year my normally near black hair would be bleached blond by the sun just from the amount of time I'd spent swimming.
My favorite time as a kid, in 81 through 85ish, at summer camp, I brought a set of tools and cheap weller, few simple parts and scrap wire. This was the dawn of walkmans and stereo radios/ghetto blasters, which often broke in the camp conditions. Many of which I would repair except for the worst cases. Because of the time and high price of these items, I clearly was trusted with such expensive gear and clearly saved a tone of money in repairs for those involved. Also earned a bunch of canteen food, or, late night snacks as the counselors would leave camp on their day off and treat me with goods the day after.
I too had it, but it was named "Electronic Engineer":
Interesting how many of us got started with those Philips electronics kits.
I still have the instructions manual, in Spanish:
Wait, I'm still a kid, at heart.
The most memorable toys I played with were mostly old broken bits from the family and friends.
My parents would sometimes bring toys back from Japan. The best of all was this 1:10 RC car:
It came as a kit that you had to assemble, tune, and paint yourself. I can remember many happy hours on the bench and later at the park.
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It was called Whirly Bird in the UK.
Is that a WILESCO steam engine?
When I was very young, my granddad had a Wilesco steam engine driving a small DC generator, which in turn would power a few tiny lamps. Because of the burn hazards, he would never allowed me to play alone with it.
When I became old enough to play with it on my own, he had already passed away and I never knew what happened to the unit.
Thus, a few years ago I purchased myself a Wilesco D18, and I have gradually added some belt-driven accessories. I also added a voltmeter to measure the generators DC voltage, a knife switch to turn off the lights, and built a tachometer (with an LM331) to measure the speed.
The meters are completely analog, of course.
I got this Tasco telescope for Christmas 1976 or 1977 when I was 10 or 11 and growing up in the UK. It's managed to follow me around the world and the photo shows it set up to look at the solar eclipse last year. The second photo is a photo taken with my phone of the image of the sun projected on to the poster board. Cool spots!
Lego, meccano, tonka toys, matchbox cars. But also books: Little Golden Book series, like The Color Twins; How and Why Wonder Book series, like Rockets and Missiles. Those books were magic.
And later, my prized possession, a Tamiya King Cobra slot car. Recently, I put it out near the sidewalk (footpath), in the original box, for someone else to enjoy. It still worked (tested with a DC source). Gone within an hour.
I still have much of my original Lego. My kids have passed through their own Lego phase, and my old Lego still fits with the new, even though Lego has obviously changed the molds and pocketing. The dimensional and colour stability of the old stuff is surprisingly good. That speaks very highly of Lego's engineering and process control.
Old and new Lego are now in protective storage, awaiting the next generation of little users.
Tomy "Zoids" robot dinosaurs kits. Completely unobtainium now, I have never seen anyone on a fleamarket or so.
My favorite was the 130 in one then the 200 in one electronics kit from radio shack. Kind of like a bread board with the parts already attached. I can still remember the starting wiring sequences: 1 to 29, 2 to 39. That was the output transformer to the speaker of all the radio projects. I remember using the germanium diode more then the silicon one for some reason then when doing electronics for real I have never used a germanium diode.
Philips EE20 was what started me on electronics too. 2x AC128 and 1xAF116 if I recall. The radio worked surprisingly well for such a low semiconductor count. In fact all of the circuits did. Somebody put a fair bit of work into that, methinks.
My elder brother had one of those Philips too, but I was too small yet to play with it. Later on Fischer Technik had toys with filp flops, logic and timer modules and I played a bit with those, but didn't like it too much. What really caught me was the elektor and ETI magazines, learning to make your own pcbs with photoresist, ferric chloride and the dremel, preferably with many dip chips (mostly 555s and series 74) and the more seven segment displays and leds, the better. Bonus points if the circuit could, for any reason, be interfaced to the Apple II. I only dug into analog waters much later out of necessity, digital is so much easier/rewarding (as Bob Widlar would put it).
Merlin Wiki;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(game)
I had one of those, one of the few electronic games I had as a kid.
I had one too, in my 20's, and was quite good at it. Years later, when the wonderful & graphically
oriented Windows 3.1 came in, I re-wrote it using 'VB3' just for fun!! (Lost now...)
Tomy "Zoids" robot dinosaurs kits. Completely unobtainium now, I have never seen anyone on a fleamarket or so.
I've got two of them in my boxes in the basement. One is a walker and the other is essentially a robot-dinosaur sea turtle. I remember they came with little gold-colored pilots that were also the perfect size to sit in the cab of Optimus Prime.
Lego.
A lot of it.
Then a 286 with 2MByte RAM and 40 MByte HDD
OMG
JARTS!
THE ONLY LAWN GAME WHERE YOU CAN KILL YOUR COMPETITION.
banned now as i understand it... can't imagine why!
I had a Rubik's clock. Not anywhere near as challenging as the cube.