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.