h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Not, by the way, Legos - the manufacturers are very firm on this: it's Lego sets, Lego bricks, etc.

I had loads of Lego when I was a child, and built amazing constructions with sections of wall which turned out to be concealed doors, floors which turned into ramps, bridges, incredible vehicles, all sorts. I used to make secret bases and fill them with my seven matching Matchbox Mercury police cars. Lego was the ideal way to kill a dull Sunday.

Now my kids have Lego too. And there are bits which I could only have dreamed about! Pinions, racks, chains, gears, pneumatic rams, the whole nine yards! It's FABULOUS! Sometimes I even let *them* play with it

Also, there's Duplo (also by Lego) for the small people. We buy this second hand in large quantities and have built towers up to eight feet tall, which the kids then happily demolish.

Lego's slogan is "it's a new toy every day" and they are right about that.

Lego is wonderful. Or should you say Lego ARE wonderful? Or is 'Legos are wonderful' the correct form? hmmm....

I think I had a very early version of Lego, but I have no idea who made it. They were sorta in the same shape as Lego, but they came in a round 'Tinker-toy' kinda can and were all white. They looked like a brick wall when put together, and there were little doors and clear windows as well. The plans were for various kinds of 'brick' buildings.

I have no idea who made them or what happened to them.

Lego was invented and originally manufactured by Lego (a Swedish firm). Others have imitated, but none have equalled. But then I would say that - I've even been to Legoland!

Dis your toy have sections of wall which slotted onto rods inserted into a base plate? Only if so what you had was Bayko, which was a fantastic toy, and one which I only rarely got to play with. Make of Bekelite, as you'd guess from the name.

The most entertaining lego toy I ever constructed was very simple, and to my knowledge has never been featured as a model that you can buy in a standalone pack, and I haven't even seen it pictured on the back of any box. Anyway this model is really fun, and I think it's a bit of a shame that the company never picked up on it. Incase anybody want's to make this for themselves, here is the construction details. ( if you don't want to make this model, please skip this bit )

step 1)
take a lego block of any colour, of a size about 4 bit's * by 2 bit's
step 2)
place said block in father's shoe
step 3, optional)
hide
(though if you hide to far away, you won't be able to see or hear the amusing results)

allthough the colour of the lego block doesn't really enhance the enjoyment of this model, a darker coloured bit will be more likely to avoid detection, also the size, you may have to adapt this model to suit the size of the shoe/owner of shoe.
Also although I have written father's shoe, don't let this restrict you, Lego is a creative toy, you may want to try this on other people, an elder siblng perhaps, or maybe a grandparent.

* bit's, being I believe the universal term for the little bumps on top of the lego blocks that allow the blocks to be fitted together.

No, that doesn't sound like what I had. The pieces were just plastic, they had little plastic 'burrs' on the edges from the mold. No rods, no base plates. Would have been in the late 40s or early 50s in the US.

I will probably never know WHAT they actually were...

GEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
I would like to take this opportunity to strongly OBJECT! Lego was NOT created and manufactured by a SWEDISH firm!
Lego was invented in 1932 by a DANISH fellow by the name of Ole Kirk Christiansen, a master carpenter and joiner in the village of Billund, Denmark, who made the first bricks from wood or ceramics. By 1934, the name Lego was applied formed from the Danish words "LEg GOdt" ("play well"). Later, it was realised that in Latin the word means "I study", "I put together".
You see, my mother spent her childhood in a near by village called Bredsten, and I remember being a kid where we went to Legoland, which was founded back in 1968. My mother even said that she knew Kjeld Kirk Christiansen, heir to the vast Lego-empire, when he was a boy. Unfortunately there is no contact between them; sigh, but we still visit the original Legoland in Billund. And that, my friend, is situated in the heart of DENMARK!!!
Some Lego-facts:
A classical 8-stud Lego-brick measures 4.9152 cm3 in volume. 9.6 by 32 by 16 millimetres. This design was patented in 1958.
If you have six 8-stud bricks, you have 102,981,500 different possible combinations at hand. No wonder, Lego is a time-consumer.
Between 1949 and 1998, the worldwide Lego factories have produced 203,000,000,000 Lego elements, including approximately 6,5 billion 8-stud bricks.
Learn more at www.lego.dk, which is in English.

P.S.
Sorry, the English version is at www.lego.com

Has anyone read "Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland? In the book all the software engineers played with Lego as kids and suggests that it seems to be a neccessary evolutionary stage in becoming an engineer. They even go as far to say that whoever built their houses/cars/ships etc out of random colour blocks ( as opposed to doing it in a colour coded manner ) would probably write really bad code.

Well I did a quick survey in my workplace ( 25 chip designers ) and almost everyone had Lego as a kid. The only one who didn't used to build stuff out of junk instead, and yes his coding style is certainly different to all of ours.

Maybe we should thank the inventor of Lego for all engineering masterpieces of the last 40 years like food processors, mobile phones and digital watches !

You should say "Lego is wonderful, Lego was wonderful and Lego will always be wonderful."

I meant Danish. Of course I meant Danish. I really did. I just *typed* swedish. Danish, you see? S-W-E-D-I-S-H, Danish. What do you mean that's not how you spell it?

You mean there are people out there who don't insist on the whole model being built of one colour brick? Dangerous anarchists, if you ask me.

Now and then in primary school we used to have games afternoons and sometimes I brought in a little Lego and "allowed" a few others to play with it too. Man, I was a right little Lego fascist! "What the hell are you making? That's not a proper model, it doesn't look like anything! It's just random bricks stuck together!" I just wanted everyone to build "proper" models like me and have fun the "right" way! This probably says a lot about me and I shouldn't be saying it in a public forum.

My personal eccentricity wqas refusing to play with matchbox-sized cars and dinky-sized cars at the same time, because the dinky-sized ones were to a different scale and it just wasn't *right*.

50% of my friends accepted this without question, but the other one thought I was a bit odd

My brother and I used to build Lego cars then smash them into each other, examine the contortions of the little Lego MiniFigs inside them and see who would have died/survived/spent the rest of their lives without little Lego legs. I should have been looking at airplane crashes rather than reading this bloody USB spec if it wasn't for technical Lego.

Lego is wonderful, Lego was wonderful and Lego will always be wonderful.
And furthermore - it is the greatest product ever to come out of Denmark. (Contenders are Carlsberg Beer, red sausages and a **** excellent soccer team.)

Regarding the so-called spelling of ‘Danish’ being S-w-e-d-i-s-h, Mr. Zis Guy:
You truly are the guilty one. That is the most pathetic, revolting and absurd simulation of a poor excuse I have EVER in my entire LIFE been subject of.
As I am a teacher, you can probably (or can you?) imagine that I have heard quite a few bad excuses.
I am appalled. Here I was, thinking that Zis Guy was *intelligent*! Well, I have *obviously* gotten something wrong here. *Obviously* somebody spent his childhood *eating* all the blue bricks, eh? (Later research revealed that if you were to eat more than a pound of those a day, you could suffer harmful effects. LEGO has changed the recipe – err – the production procedure since then.)
At least now I know what the harmful effects were. Should I feel sorry? Nah…
Anyway, I hope you’ve learned your lesson. Did you go and see the www.lego.com then?

I sense a great disturbance in the Force...I see many multi-coloured buildings obviously originating from the Dark Side...erm, as usual, people get all weird analysing childrens' play habits. Anyway, when Lego first appeared in the UK, you could only get red or white bricks. In fact, you couldn't even get white roof bricks: they had to be red. Except (to repeat wot I wrote elsewhere), there was a clear plastic illuminating brick with a tiny light bulb and two terminals for a battery - now THAT was excitement in 1960. And does anyone remember the little cigarette packet sized accessory kits which used to sell for a pocket money-friendly 2/- ? (10p to all you post-decimalites). Anyway, Lego was for GURLS. Meccano - now there was a boys' toy...

There definitely is a relation between the Force and Lego. Not only can you purchase Lego-Star Wars vessels and equipment, but if you go visit http://www.jedinet.com/cinema/ you'll learn about the *real* connections between Lego and The Force.
Some of us just never let go of Lego!

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that
the nasty pink girly lego is somewhat sexist,
Girls (and boys) would benefit far more from
a wonderful toy such as lego if encouraged to
build interesting and useful things, rather than
pink houses with ponys and stuff.
Technical lego is obviously the only way to go...
Star Wars Lego? - thankyou no.

Tread carefully, my man, or Michael (aged 5) will zap you with his landspeeder!