A popular
educational children's toy from the
eighties that was made by
VTech. It was approxmately the size of a
shoe box, designed to look somewhat like a
computer, and had a small
keyboard that folded down in the front. The keyboard had the
alphabet, numbers, as well as
notes (
do,
re,
mi, etc.) on it. You would put cards in a slot in the top, and could then view them through a window in the front of it. Different cards had different activities on them, such as identifying
adjectives, learning the
musical scale, etc. The toy could tell what action to take when a card was inserted by a
barcode-like symbol on the back which it read
optically.
As I grew older, I grew weary of the toy and decided that I wanted to find out how it worked. For some reason, I was disappointed to find only some batteries and a printed circuit board.
A few years after this, VTech came out with Talking Whiz Kid, a technologically superior toy, which quickly eclipsed original whiz kid.