Behold a moderately large part of my childhood.
When I was a kid, my parents got me one of these electronics hobbyists’ kits instead of a chemistry kit. I’m pretty sure this is the right one, the design and colors look extraordinarily familiar. Though, I remember the book being extraordinarily thin for a “150-in-1” project book, and I don’t recall there being an ammeter on the one I had, so it might have been one of Science Fair’s 80-in-1 ones instead.
I remember the wires that came with the kit were copper, twisted wires, covered in plastic with stripped ends, and they would fray after a time and were very hard on young fingers. One of my favorite memories of the thing was hooking up the tweeter to beep semi-randomly, though I can’t recall how I could have done so without any kind of logic gates or timers. I was including all sorts of non-standard components though, any random crap I could scotch-tape the wires to (that’s proper contact baby!), so yeah. I’m sure I annoyed the living crap out of everyone in the house, one way or another.
As I recall, a battery leak wrecked half the bottom part of the board, and it was thrown out.
I had two Coleco Mini-Arcade games as well — Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. I think I got Donkey Kong as a consolation for my having lost the electronics kit.
I remember Donkey Kong quite fondly as being the first video game with a cheat, and I even discovered it on my own. This requires having it plugged into AC though, as it’ll suck a battery dry in no time flat. When you first switch the thing on, it plays a neat rendition of the original Donkey Kong intro tune. There’s also a very distinctive “you died” noise. If you flick the power switch off and on, several times, usually not allowing the intro tune to complete, eventually the programming will get mixed up somehow, either by not having time to thoroughly initialize all the variables or something, and the “you died” tune would play instead of the real tune. Several of the sprites would be displayed on screen when they shouldn’t for a brief second, and you’d have a ton of lives instead of the usual 3 — I’m pretty sure 64, in fact (sounds reasonable in base-2, but I can’t verify this). This was the only way I could play the game and actually make it to the top, ever. It was insanely hard, even with that cheat, though you could get some really high scores with that many lives.
I miss being a kid.
Meta sidenote: I’ve enabled a post views counter, that’s only viewable by registered users, but unfortunately it only started counting now, so I have no idea how popular any of my past posts have been. I hope to use this to tailor what kinds of posts I focus on, via how often people view them. I don’t think it counts people reading whole articles on the frontpage, nor RSS feeds, however, so it’s not exactly accurate. It’ll give me a better picture of how often people read the ones with a below-the-fold section.
What a flashback. I had one of those, one of the smaller ones. Got it second hand without a book. I love wires and electrical doohickies, but my brain chokes on anything more complicated than a basic circuit with a switch and a lightbulb. I can, however, program anything from a chip to a mainframe to flip over backwards and do jumping jacks. Go figure.
Well, I had a chemistry set, and a microscope (c. 1975). I also had one of the bazillion-in-one electronic project kits similar to the one in the picture. That was probably about 1978. I remember the little springs to hold the wire ends in place, and making funny little audio oscillators, time-delay circuits, a radio receiver, etc., with it. It was loads of fun!
Though I didn’t continue with a study of electronics, that didn’t stop me from tinkering with things, like soldering a couple of hardware switches to the motherboard of my Amiga A500 so that I could switch between NTSC and PAL video modes, and switch between 512k and 1M of “chip RAM”. I also modified a lot of “echo microphones” for CB radios in the late 80’s so that the user could vary the audio delay way past the original specs, and in real time. My biggest project was putting together an FM radio transmitter (for someone else) from a kit that they bought. Worked flawlessly the first time. I still keep a soldering iron handy in my little arsenal of tools.
Like I said over at Greg’s (whose chemistry kit post was the inspiration for this one), I never had anything chemistry-related. Instead, the parents seemed to know more about what I’d end up being than I did, giving me an electronics kit and a computer and other such gadgetry. Today, I only tinker with circuits, having forgot half of what I learned back then, though I have lots of little pieces of electronics sitting in a drawer from every time I have a gadget that I’ve determined to be end-of-life, and disassemble and desolder anything I think might be useful at some point in the distant future.
I remember we had a microscope, a relatively cheap one with little glass slides that cut you if you weren’t careful with them, but it wasn’t “mine” specifically, and it collected dust in the broom closet for a very long time. I have a very distinct memory of intentionally poking myself with a needle to get a drop of blood to look at (though I could have used those damn glass slides!), and being sorely disappointed that the quality of the microscope was such that even at maximum magnification I could barely make out anything special. I also remember it came with a bunch of sample slides of hair, plant cells, and I think pieces of bugs, where you couldn’t remove the sample from the glass.