Never played with this one. Did quite a bit with the EV3 range.

Might have been a better match with yesterday’s part.

There's a lightning bolt coming from one's Mind on the cover, but you still need 6 AAs and a 9v battery just to use the thing.

@Meppers said:
"this is the world's first consumer product to use the Scratch programming language (called logoblocks at the time)"

So when people asked me if I used Scratch all the time I was doing classes with EV3 my answer should have been yes?! Or had they diverged/changed what they used by then?

Don't you just love a set where five sixths of the pieces are in grey-scale?

No, no, no LEGO it's lightning in a *bottle* you need to make to rake in the big bucks, not lightning in a box!

I got this as a hand-me-down from our friends when they moved out of town. Their son wasn’t into LEGO anymore and they knew that I was so they gave me a whole bunch sets, including this NIB.

@Randomness said:
"Don't you just love a set where five sixths of the pieces are in grey-scale?"

3443, K34431, K34432, K34433, K34434.

Well, that didn't work. Um...

https://brickset.com/sets/K34431-1/Mosaic-Cat
https://brickset.com/sets/K34432-1/Mosaic-Dino
https://brickset.com/sets/K34433-1/Mosaic-Johnny-Thunder
https://brickset.com/sets/K34434-1/Mosaic-Tiger

I think my LUG used piles of the Tiger set for ballast.

Man, I love late 90s graphic design!

A bit connected… Isn’t Mindstorms ending soon , or has ended? …What will it be followed by? Now that I have kids I’d love to introduce them to robotics via LEGO.

The set must be hiding behind all that lightning, I can't see it anywhere!

Or is it my trans neon green tinted glasses are just hiding it from me because it's not Blacktron?

@PurpleDave said:
"Ah, this is the ill-fated RIS 1.0 version. The RCX brick had a 9v AC jack so you didn't need to run it on batteries. Yes, the power adapter put out 9v _AC_, not DC. This was a fatal flaw, as many buyers didn't want to pay through the nose for an official LEGO power adapter, and bought a universal adapter at Radio Shack. The problem was, most of them bought a DC adapter, not an AC one. DC puts all the juice through one side of the power bus, and maxing it out would overload and fry that side of the power bus. You could still use it if you reversed the polarity, but a second instance would fry out the rest of the power bus and render the jack useless. If you got the AC adapter (either direct from LEGO.com, or because you paid attention to what it said on the RCX), it split the load between the two sides of the power bus, and there wouldn't be a problem.

So their response was to remove the power jack and release the RIS 1.5 the following year. Later, when they moved on to the NXT, they also produced a Lithium-Polymer battery pack, which you could use as a way to run the NXT on wall power. I don't know for certain, but I suspect this time it didn't matter if you hooked the battery up to AC or DC power, and the battery would only provide DC power to the NXT brick because it's a battery pack."

What never knew that about it. Only had the 2.0 Version. The grappling arm looked kinda nice on Display, although it had a rather messy color scheme.

It looks good.

Ah, the set that properly got me out of my dark ages...
J.P. Brown's Rubik's cube solver was just mindblowing back in the day.

I never had the 90s sets but I did once own the 2007 NXT version. It turned out I'm more of a collector than an inventor so once I built all the official models (which could only be built with the accompanying software. The physical instructions were just for one part of a starter model and setup) I wasn't creative enough to build AND program my own creations.
I built some creations from the technic parts but I just wasn't able to think of much I could do with the three bulky motors amidst all the studless technic.

In that sense I think the old Mindstorms must have been more intuitive. The studded system invites more customization and to just plonk stuff on. And you can use regular sets to help with the build. With studless technic I would be more hestitant to just throw other sets in the mix.

@axeleng:
Weirder still when you consider they’re getting rid of the one name that’s a theme, rather than a system of electronic components. They tried this stunt with Technic and Duplo two decades ago, and it couldn’t have taken more than a year for them to learn the error of their ways.

@Duq:
I probably would have found it more impressive if my brother hadn’t once bought a pamphlet that explained how to solve one regardless of what pattern was showing. Between rotations, position swaps, corners, and sides, there are basically only three moves you need to learn, and then it’s just a matter of grinding your way through it. For speed, it really just comes down to a combination of how dexterous your hands are, and how quickly you can process the various patterns and figure out which step you need to do next. And I’m guessing it would help if you get your cube nice and loose, so you’re not fighting friction.

I was always annoyed this was Windows-only...especially when many schools had Macintosh computers.

@PDelahanty:
That’s because Apple would give schools and students deep discounts in the hopes that they’d hook a customer for life, and schools and students would bite without checking to see if anyone wrote programs for Macs that weren’t called “Adobe Photoshop” (hint: they don’t).

@PurpleDave said:
" @PDelahanty:
That’s because Apple would give schools and students deep discounts in the hopes that they’d hook a customer for life, and schools and students would bite without checking to see if anyone wrote programs for Macs that weren’t called “Adobe Photoshop” (hint: they don’t)."

How times have changed. :)

@PDelahanty:
No, they still don't program for Macs. Okay, okay, you're right. Steve Jobs had a falling out with Adobe, so they probably don't either.