From Kevin:

Even now as a 32 year-old adult I’ll pick up the occasional package addressed to me that’s sitting under the tree and give it a shake. I don’t know what I expect to hear and tell from that act, it’s not like I’m getting a bunch of toys any more. I guess it’s just something that’s been ingrained in me since I was a kid: sleuthing around the gift pile trying to recognize the exact dimensions and shapes of certain things that I asked Santa to get me that year. My mother knew I did this early on and when my grandmother got me Zelda the Christmas it came out she put inside a huge box so that I wouldn’t know it was a NES game.

The shaking of a gift package never worked better than it did when I would shake a box of Legos, my favorite gift of yesteryear. The sound of those interlocking bricks rattling around is completely unique and instantly recognizable. I would be lucky enough to get some small sets here and there throughout the year that would contribute to my large pile that I kept in an old hard body suitcase under my bed. It was the special occasions, like Christmas and my birthday, that I would sometimes get the larger play sets. An airport here, a police station there.

I’d spend the rest of Christmas morning meticulously following the directions, making sure not to miss a brick. At the end I’d have this marvelous structure in front of me waiting to be populated with other creations from my “Lego suitcase”. For a while I’d keep the new bricks and pieces separated from the ones I already owned, not wanting to have to search for the new pieces if I wanted them but eventually and inevitably they’d take their place in the ever-growing pile.

Legos today have changed a bit. There’s more specific “themes” (more broad than “city” or “space”) and a whole lot more licensing (Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc.) but the creativity that they inspire is alive and well. I saw that first hand when the day came for me to “hand down” my old, battered suitcase to my nephew who was just starting to discover the wonder that those little colored bricks can provide.

When Kevin asked me to come up with a memorable, nerdy Christmas gift that stuck out in my mind, it easily came to me – my 200-in-1 Radio Shack Science Lab…. thing. I don’t remember exactly what it was called, but I know the 200-in-1 part was crucial. Before I describe this device, I need to show you exactly what I’m talking about:

Is that fucking rad or what.

So the idea behind these things – there were several models, ranging from 5-in-1 all the way up to the mother of them all, up there – was to teach kids about electronics while presenting actual hardware in an easily configurable state. The various little springs all over the board were connected to wires provided with the kit, of various lengths. All you had to do to create something was start connecting springs. It had a battery compartment beneath it to provide juice (which was all regulated by sealed electronics in the case). The manual that came with it detailed the 200 things that you could configure, ranging from simple telegraph switches up through LED display configuration, crystal radios and more complicated logic loops where you could cause the light array to do light math, or throw a synthesized sound through the speaker while attenuating it with one of the knobs.

It blew my mind. Not only did it serve as an excellent bit of prop work for whatever fort your were building at the time (always be building forts, the 11-year-old’s motto) but when you could actually make something that really functioned, it gave you this otherworldly cred in both your friend’s eyes as well as your own. So for instance, I once configured a motion sensor alarm that flashed the red lamp and played a screeching, oscillating loop when someone came near it. (“It” being the fort.)

I proceeded to eventually rip apart most of the things I would count as electronic toys, just so I could find the now-familiar shapes of resistors and diodes inside. It killed the mystery, but enlightened in a new way. I still remember being amazed by the discovery that the shape of most toys had nothing to do with their function – they were typically 95% air, or filler. The Science Lab proved what was real; it separated the magic from the circuits.

If had been born in 2000 and I tried to bring something like this to school now, I would probably get arrested.

No matter what toys I had when I was a kid, they were almost always similar in one big way…they were some sort of technological marvel (to me). Be it a do it yourself science kit that let youcreate sounds and tones by routing wires or an Atari 2600, whatever I had with either pluggedinto a wall or used a cavalcade of batteries. So I’m it was of no surprise to my parents in 1986(which puts me at 9) when I stated that I had no interest in that lame Etch-A-Sketch a thing, butrather what I really wanted was THE ANIMATOR.

So after painting and drawing and erasing and toggling between frames for hours and hours onend I’d run to show my parents the fruits of my labor and play my video of a ball bouncing. Yea,honestly it was kind of a letdown. I mean 12 frames of blocky animation, not even Ub Iwerkscould do anything mindblowing(obscure Disney reference FTW!).
Luckily the booklet included some cool options, so I was able to actually do some cooler stufflike a cat running or a skeleton dancing… and in glorious monochrome and for no more than 12frames. Damn, now I want to play with one… I wonder how much they go for on ebay?