LEGO Brick Timeline: 50 Years of Building Frenzy and Curiosities
I was such a Lego freak when I was a kid. They were my first nerd love before computers and code and a real blast looking at the packaging of the space sets here. My brother and I didn’t just build the sets and play around with them. Oh no — we used to “hack” the pieces make much larger and meaner creations with a totally different scale. The names of the ships and weaponry where named after ships in an early Japanese anime cartoon called Star Blazers that was in syndication after school. Star Blazers was originally called Space Battleship Yamato before it was dubbed and watered down for the states. Our ship was The Andromeda and at one point was over three feet long and 18 inches wide and high. I had a picture of it that I wish I could still find.
Those were the days — and look where it’s brought me. I’m certain that a big large part of my ability to work with abstract concepts, develop mental models of logic and break a larger complex system into small parts as I do when coding goes back to what I started to develop as a boy then. It’s amazing what some plastics blocks and molded pieces along with the motivation to have the biggest and baddest Lego space battleship on the block can be turned in to.
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