Lego Mindstorms

» see lego.com/themes/mindstorms as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The first Mindstorms kit shipped on 1 September 1998. Inside the box was a fat yellow brick called the RCX: a Hitachi microcontroller with an infrared port on top, three input ports and three output ports. Around it were motors, a touch sensor, a light sensor, and a pile of ordinary Lego Technic parts. What it did not have was a model on the front of the box that you were supposed to build.

That was the point of it. Lego had spent the 1990s in decline and Lego Education had spent a decade making classroom products with a division called Dacta, working from research the MIT Media Lab had been doing since the early 1980s on what happens when you let a child program a physical object. The earlier bricks had to stay tethered to a computer. The RCX did not. You wrote a program on a PC, beamed it over infrared, unplugged everything, and the thing on the carpet moved on its own.

The name came from Seymour Papert's 1980 book, which argued that children learn best by building things they can debug. Lego licensed the title because the product was an argument for the same idea in plastic. Tormod Askildsen, who set up the home-learning division in 1995 after ten years of frustration working through teachers, wanted the thing to reach the child directly rather than through a curriculum.

In 1998 I was fourteen and had just started getting online at 33.6k. Mindstorms cost about two hundred dollars in a country where an imported Lego set was already a luxury object, so this was not a box that turned up in Turkish houses. The category it created is close to my working life now, and the kit itself was never in it.

~ the case file ~

~ the part lego did not plan for ~

Within weeks of release the RCX firmware had been reverse-engineered by people who were not children. What Lego's lawyers could have treated as an attack, the company decided to treat as free development, and the result was a decade of alternative toolchains built by strangers. NQC gave the brick a C-like syntax and leJOS put a Java virtual machine on it, and behind those came pbForth, pbLua, an OCaml module, and a long tail of others. Lego eventually published the firmware specifications itself.

The adult hobbyist community that grew out of this is one of the few cases where a toy company's most valuable users were people well outside its target age. By the time the NXT was in development in the mid 2000s Lego had four fans on the design panel by name, and the launch generated more press coverage, measured in airtime and magazine pages, than the entire company had accumulated in its history to that point.

~ four bricks ~

The RCX ran from 1998 through three revisions of the Robotics Invention System, with Star Wars-branded variants using a smaller brick called the Scout. The NXT arrived on 1 August 2006 with a proper LCD and Bluetooth on board, and sold $30 million of kits in its first year, revised as NXT 2.0 on 5 August 2009 with a color sensor. EV3 followed in 2013 on a Linux-capable ARM9. The last one, Robot Inventor, was announced in June 2020 and ran on a hub shared with Lego's education Spike line.

That shared hub is what makes the ending readable. By 2020 the hardware under Mindstorms and under Spike Prime was effectively the same object with two different apps and two different price tags, one sold to parents and one sold to school procurement. Only one of those two buyers was growing.

~ what really happened ~

Lego confirmed in late October 2022 that Mindstorms was leaving the portfolio at the end of the year. The set 51515 and its two component packs stopped being made on 31 December 2022. The Robot Inventor app was promised to stay live until at least the end of 2024, which is the part that dates the product more precisely than the box does: the fourth generation needed a phone or a tablet and a maintained app, and the first generation needed a serial port and nothing else.

Twenty four years is a long run for anything sold in a toy aisle. What Mindstorms leaves behind is not really the kits, which still work and still sell secondhand at prices that embarrass the original retail. It is the group of engineers who first wrote a loop that made something physical turn, and did it on a carpet rather than in a lab.

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