> I got the original Lego Mindstorms 1.0 kit for my 8th birthday - there was no programming interface, just a way to select one of 256 possible sequences of hig

> I got the original Lego Mindstorms 1.0 kit for my 8th birthday - there was no programming interface, just a way to select one of 256 possible sequences of high-level actions the robot would perform in a loop. Are you sure you're not thinking of the Robotics Discovery Set? The blue brick? It had a bunch of predefined things you could stitch together to make little programs directly via the brick's interface. RIS 1.0 definitely had a programming interface via the serial IR tower.