Pour one out for Mindstorms. The build-it-yourself Lego robotics brand is getting discontinued at the end of next year, but that doesn’t mean it won’t forever live on in our hearts. But it almost didn’t happen. In his book The Lego Story, Jens Andersen writes about the toy company’s growth from making wooden ducks to making Hollywood movies. Particularly engrossing is his writeup on how the company, spearheaded by Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, himself the grandson of Lego founder Ole Kirk Kristiansen and the son of Lego “System” designer Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, narrowly avoided giving in to ‘80s fearmongering surrounding the success of handheld gaming consoles to dive headfirst into sets built to work with computers. While Lego’s initial robotics experiments, made in collaboration with MIT, weren’t labelled as Mindstorms, they laid the groundwork for the line’s eventual launch in 1998.
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