The Milton Bradley Big Trak | Hacker News Reader

The Milton Bradley Big Trak

paleotronic.com

53 pointsempressplay23 comments

I had one of these as a kid. It was awesome!! I believe it was my first exposure to programing. I even have a picture of me with it. Plaid shirts and programming. Not much has changed in ~40 years.

https://blog.buildbotics.com/content/images/2018/12/1-oeEOUx...

I always forget that this was my first programming experience :)

Yes I had this too. Unfortunately it didn't support conditions or loop IIRC :)

It has very, very basic loop functionally. A repeat function would be more accurate.

Drive round the living room, fire laser (n) times to get dad's attention, wait for dad to load it with peanuts, drive back. That was a very good xmas.

Any D batteries in the house got snatched up fast. Any flashlights with good batteries usually got swapped for dead ones.

Anyone else remember their bigtrak being a matte grey, instead of white like in the article? I remember skipping the decal installation too -- didn't care for the stripes.

I remember mine being gray too, but I don't know - that was a long time ago!

The original was grey. ThinkGeek put out a "remake" a few years ago, which was white.

This is the original grey:

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/O68AAOSwg1JcQlyT/s-l640.jpg

There's a maker group local to me that constructed a drivable version called BigHak! http://hackhitchin.org.uk/bighak/

For anyone looking for something similar for a younger age group: https://www.learningresources.com/product/learning+essential.... My 6yo daughter enjoys it even more than I'd hoped she would. I believe I found it on the Purdue Engineering gift guide shared on HN before Christmas.

I remember the ads! I so wanted one of these things :)

It was 1979? Wow. Given I was a '78 baby, I'm guessing they were either late to the UK, or on the market for a number of years.

Relaunched you say? Huh...

Same- I remember it as a massive, worldwide source of envy.

I’m glad at least one commentor remembers it the same.

I was 19 years old and I also wanted one of those. But I had to choose, and I finally ended up getting a Chess Challenger 7: https://www.schach-computer.info/wiki/index.php/Fidelity_Che...

There was even an add-on “dump cart” which could be towed and (IIRC) dumped programmatically via the 1/8” mini-plug that served as part of its hitch. Fun times!

Man, that was a good time. I remember writing out paths on paper that were lines of arrows. Had to adjust turn values based on the surface friction; linoleum needed less turn, and carpet needed more. Talk about learning to debug...

Better info on what's inside the thing: http://www.robotroom.com/BigTrak.html

I always wanted one of these, so when I saw a new-gen one I snapped it up ("for the kids", of course. :) Disappointingly the software seems to be buggy, though - on a fair percentage of turn instructions it just buzzes for a second or so and then turns backs up before turning less than it should have done. I guess I just need to pull it apart and upgrade it...

You can still find the original ones all over eBay.

My dad got me one of these, may have a picture of it somewhere. Great memories of exploring the house with it. <3 <3

One thing not mentioned. If memory serves it took something like 8 D batteries and ate them for breakfast! My little pinball machine ate them even faster, haha.

Reminds me of my 255 Computer Command from the same era: https://youtu.be/1D1l1FImAgI

Now even more upset for my 7 year old self that I didn't get one reading the comments here about how awesome it was! The marketing was certainly very successful - I can still just about remember the TV adverts 35 ish (eek) years later.

I had something similar on my Capsela set. I think Robotix had one too. I think they came out a few years later though.

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