Bigtrak
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Quite possibly the finest electronic toy ever, right up there with Electronic Talking Starbird, Omnibot and those funky robotic arms they used to sell (Darn, the top floor of Hamleys was really something). The Bigtrak was MB's answer to the robot craze of the early 1980's, and was a shoebox-sized white tracked vehicle that wouldn't have looked out of place rolling around the Moon on a Gerry Anderson series. But wait! What's that on its back? It's an touch-type keypad, allowing the jammy child to program Bigtrak with navigational commands which the toy will execute flawlessly! Wow! Deliver an apple to your mum from another room in the house! Get Bigtrak to weave effortlessly though a makeshift obstacle course constructed from books! And, er... errrrrrrrr...
And yet it didn't matter that there were only two things you could do with it. Bigtrak was such a highly charged item of near-religious importance to the children of its day that its flaws were of little import; even now, a fully working Bigtrak remains an unnattainable holy grail to many. It was that cool.
Bigtrak's status as an honest-to-goodness robot, plus its dependance on basic mathematics skills for programming, made it a firm favorite with teachers. They may have claimed that Bigtrak was a valuble educational aid, but we all knew that they really enjoyed mucking about with the thing once all the kids had gone home.
And yet it didn't matter that there were only two things you could do with it. Bigtrak was such a highly charged item of near-religious importance to the children of its day that its flaws were of little import; even now, a fully working Bigtrak remains an unnattainable holy grail to many. It was that cool.
Bigtrak's status as an honest-to-goodness robot, plus its dependance on basic mathematics skills for programming, made it a firm favorite with teachers. They may have claimed that Bigtrak was a valuble educational aid, but we all knew that they really enjoyed mucking about with the thing once all the kids had gone home.
