Title: The origins of LEGO Mindstorms
Slug: origins-of-lego-mindstorms
Date: 2023-12-17 20:55:00
Author: Kartones
Lang: en
Tags: Development, Robotics, Resources
og_image: https://images.kartones.net/posts/kartonesblog/lego_programmable_bricks.jpg
Description: LEGO Mindstorms, a popular robotics brand, was discontinued in 2022. This post briefly explores its origins.


I recently learned that around two years after announcing the [Mindstorms Robot Inventor](https://www.lego.com/en-gb/aboutus/news/2020/june/lego-mindstorms-robot-inventor), LEGO [discontinued the Mindstorms brand](https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428766/lego-discontinue-mindstorm-educational-robots) in 2022.

It is sad because [I've always thought](https://blog.kartones.net/post/two-decades-lego-mindstorms) LEGO Mindstorms was a great way to build robots by focusing on the creative and programming aspects while removing the complex hardware involved in a non-LEGO robot.

Reading a bit about its history, it is surprising how old it is and its origin, so here are some highlights I found interesting:

- It all began with the [Logo programming language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)), which was created in 1967! I used the the Turtle Logo Pascal library ([Turtle Graphics](https://cs.nyu.edu/~marateck/turtle.html)?) to draw figures and spirals in high school.

- The [Technic Control Center](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms#Lego/Logo_and_the_Technic_Control_Center_(1985)), in 1985, was the first combination of LEGO with a programming language.

- "Logo Blocks" were the predecessors of "RCX Code" and later evolutions, a purely visual program control flow language, by adding and linking visual blocks that represented loops, conditionals, sensor values, and the like.

- The first **LEGO Mindstorms** product appeared in 1998 (the Robotics Invention System, aka "yellow brick"), but the name comes from a 1980 book, [Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindstorms_(book)).

- The yellow brick was the first model commercialized to the public, but before it existed both a red brick and a grey brick:

![grey, red and yellow LEGO programmable bricks (from Wikipedia)](https://images.kartones.net/posts/kartonesblog/lego_programmable_bricks.jpg)



Additional Resources:

- [To Mindstorms and Beyond: Evolution of a Construction Kit for Magical Machines](https://cs.uml.edu/~fredm/papers/magical-machines.pdf)