If the inventor of Game And Watch didn’t retire a multi-millionaire at the end of the ’80s to a luxury mansion in the Bahamas then there is no justice in the world. For what was this toy but a perfectly weighted and targeted marketing triumph? A small, portable game that could masquerade when required as a digital watch, meaning kids could persuade parents and teachers alike that it was a legitimate scholastic tool (“But Dad, don’t you want me to know what the time is?”), Game And Watch was the logical next step for a company that had exhausted the potential of the 50m water-resistant chronograph. It was time to take the watch off the wrist and lay it on the table. ... more>>>

Dallas - the home of cowboys, oil wells and early integrated circuits as produced by Texas Instruments. Originally founded in seismography (to wheedle out those reticent little underground reservoirs of oil), TI moved into electronics in the ‘50s. A couple of decades later, the Speak & Spell was born (and the rest is history), though it was preceded by it’s less talkative cousin, the Little Professor. ... more>>>

Calculators became something of a school obsession in the early teens of ‘80s kids, although even the most maths-obsessed pubescent would’ve found it hard to justify a requirement for logarithmic polynomial functions to parents already skeptical that the damn things were allowed in the classroom. This was probably the first generation for whom electronic aids were encouraged and, in some cases, compulsory, as long as the battery compartments of same weren’t used to conceal various useful formulae in maths exams. (If you attended Grange Hill, of course, you were required to raise the bar on even this illicit behaviour by attempting to smuggle class A drugs into your mock ‘O’ levels.) ... more>>>