Discussion on:

What was your first geeky gift?

I purchased it when Best Buy could only answer questions with the word yes.

a Sears Electronic Sliderule calculator...yes, a long time ago!

I bought myself what would now be called a Propelling Pencil to use when I was Drawing at Uni.

Not Artist type Drawing but straight Technical Drawings of things Open & In Line for Assembly.

I splurged on that Pencil when I redrew a drawing that couldn't be assembled and had all nasty Red Pen Marks on it when it was returned with references to Stress Points that had been introduced by the rework. The Professor being Typical of most University professors just replied that it was a Fitting Problem not a Design Problem even though there was no way that the parts which could easily be made could be assembled.

So for the rest of my Mech Engineering Course I just replied whenever asked

"That's a Fitting Problem not a Design Issue."

Got me out of needing to do so much work.

I still have that Pencil around here somewhere as it was a very nice thin one that felt great in your hand. For that matter I still have all of my drawing instruments and a very old Slide Rule which I most defiantly know where it is though by now I couldn't do any more than Multiply & Divide on it. None of the Advanced Stuff that was a mainstay of what I used to do.

Col

If the regular Scouts start fires by rubbing sticks together, then we definitely need Geek Scouts who perform maths with slide rules and code GUIs in Fortran.

No, not the one with the marbles.
The one with the round wooden pieces with Chinese wordsigns on them: Mandarin, Cannon, Chariot, Minister... like that.

In 1975, I was 5 years old. I asked my family for a calculator for Christmas. My half-brother, a star parochial high-school quarterback, bought me this:

http://www.vintage-technology.info/pages/calculators/t/texasti1200.htm

Just finding this picture brought a tremendous wave of nostalgia back for me.

This was absolutely the first indication to my family that I was *not* going to be a star high-school quarterback. I was also a huge fan of Ultra-man and Speed Racer by this point, so my future was pretty much a given.

I had the calculator for years - I think I probably lost track of it when I was around 17.

I remember my dad was working with what must be descendant of that one, and probably ten years later. It could store data to little magnetic strips, and I think it had sort of a weird docking station with a paper strip printer (like a cash register)... otherwise it looked exactly like that one.
Edited to add: Found it, it was the TI59 with PC100 printer, http://www.vintagecalculators.com/ti_59.JPG
From 1977, but it was still alive and kicking in '85 - but then, they made stuff to last back then, didn't they?

I forget what it was called but when I was 3 my parents bought me a electronic math game (~1982). Whenever you got a question right there was this little guys face and his mustache would wiggle. I was apparently somewhat of a prodigy as I was answering ~grade 5 math questions when I was 3. Sadly I've gotten relatively dumber with age

I got the Sony Walkman tape player, with an insert that had an antenna that turned it into a radio when I was 16. It was awesome.

I was like 3 years old.
First game was Mario Kart.

I was about 7 years old, and I got an NES. We had a TV from the 70s and it only had the UHF/VHF connectors. So I had to find those UHF/VHF cable converter things. After a day of searching I found them, and managed to hook it up. Good times...

Gregory Meyer
http://www.onlinetech.com

My dad had assembled a whole stereo system complete with vacuum tubes from Heathkit sometime in the early 60s (I think he still uses it in the garage), which I thought was awesome. Later (maybe 69 or 70 I think) he got me an electronic kit which had a kind of pegboard on a frame on which you mounted the components. Then with wires and instructions you could wire up an alarm, a radio, etc. Many hours of fun.

When I was an infant, someone gave me a Disney toy where you pushed a button or flipped a switch and a Disney character would pop up. When I was around 4, I saw Empire Strikes Back, and decided that my toy was now a computer. I would sit in a cardboard box and play with that thing and pretend I was on a spaceship. Man, I was a dorky kid.

Edit: Thinking on this further, I realize that it wasn't really a geeky present as much as I just put it to a geeky use. So, my first really geeky present was probably when one of my dad's friends gave me a copy of the script from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which isn't old tech, but is definitely geeky.

This one, in fact: http://www.buysellcommunity.com/image.jsp?item=OSZAEDXT&sequence_id=3

Unfortunately, it didn't survive my brothers' childhoods...

Does anyone remember Merlin? I still have it along with the original box and instructions and it still works.

Mine were American Bricks, rather than the more expense Legos. The upside was I had more of them than my Lego friends.

Electronic chess game from Fidelity, still have it.

Radio Shack 150 in 1 Electronics Project Kit.

Cobra 29 CB Radio (Christmas Present for my dad and I) My uncles gave me the handle "Little Professor". I could "DX" barefoot from home about 20 miles.

There is a great study of the questions of nature vs. nurture going on in this thread.

Did we want these kind of gifts because we were geeks...

Or did we become geeks because we got these kind of gifts...

When I was around 5, someone gave me a giant (at least it seemed that way) Gaiking robot from the "Shogun Warriors" series. Probably the very first thing I ever owned that was related to anime: http://www.collectiondx.com/toy_review/1978/gaiking

It shot missles that wouldn't even break a piece of paper, but it also had a spring propelled fist that was strong enough to blow a space lego model to smithereens... great fun and probably something you could never get away with today.