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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Forgotten? It’s the first time I’m hearing about it.

I lived through the 1980’s. I pretty sure this trend never registered.

I was barely aware of it. I had (and still have, it doesn't work) an Armatron, and read about some of these robots in books in my high school library and I was fascinated by them. Not smart enough to actually do anything with that fascination, but still... robots.

There was one that had six legs and looked like a viral sheath that I thought looked really cool, but I can't find a picture of for reference. I think it actually appeared on a news program or something.

edit: found it![0]

[0]http://www.theoldrobots.com/odex.html

As a nerdy kid, I was exposed to all this personal robot hype (particularly marketing material from Nolan Bushnell's Androbot) via pop-science library books -- all of them somehow staying in circulation 15-20 years after nearly all the companies mentioned went out of business in '85-'86. Looking for information about the machines in those half-remembered books is what led me to write the article.

I think it would be really easy to miss all of that if you weren't specifically interested in robots growing up, or if you grew out of robot books aimed at children before those books had gotten into the library system. A lot of them were probably published after the machines (aside from the HERO & RB5X) were no longer available, because the publishing pipeline is about 18 months & Androbot went from launch to bankruptcy in about two years.

Now that is cool :-)

One of the highlights from my childhood was being served by a Coca-Cola cobot at a diner, refilled my drink for me. It was soon after the Winter Olympics where we got to see it ice skate.

Like all trends, it was localized. You had to live in the right place at the right time.

Me too. It wasn't much of a "trend", there were a few robots available that didn't do much other than slowly move about. I remember the robot "butler". Utterly useless.

Marvin the depressed robot would have been a lauded improvement.

Actually, it was Marvin the paranoid android :-)

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