The precision in tolerance over the years is truly breathtaking.
It speaks to Ole Kirk Christiansen's impossible standards: "Even the best is not good enough" (Det Bedste Er Ikke For Godt.) (usually translated "Only the best is good enough.")
Much more strenuous in Danish than the usual quoted translation! but I know some Danish, and most of all that's how Kjeld Kirk Christiansen explained it to an American audience at Brickfest 2003 (IIRC the year).
As I commented elsewhere, it's not 60 years. Sure, the outer dimensions have not changed and are very strict metric Lego Units. [1] But there have been continual improvement that render old and new less than wonderful to use together. You don't really want to mix 70s-early 80s bricks.
Conversely, if you're reselling those old sets, you need to find vintage pieces (though also Lego would use up older pieces and begin to use newer ones in that set)
But bricks from the mature design of the 80s even didn't age so well (clutch too hard, walls can warp), and there have been many improvements to the interior of a brick. All for sound engineering reasons. Thinner walls and internal voids to prevent warp, subtle changes to fine-tune clutch power.
It's a story of continual improvement, but it makes the old bricks seem less wonderful.
Weird thing Lego started to advertise in the 2000s: Lego bricks reach the proper clutch power after 7 insertions! I guess you have to stress-work the new plastic...
[1] I've used a micrometer on pieces of various age and can't get a difference from the outside. Doesn't help that they compress under measuring.
Yes, it was a shame. After Lego lost in court (to Hilary Page's heirs I think by then) I believe they finally atoned for that.
Still, Lego didn't just sell the Kiddicraft brick unmodified. Lego patented the tubes inside, which gave it superior clutch power. (I have a lot of 2x4 bricks with "Pat Pend" molded on them!)
As I've heard it, Ole Kirk Christiansen had seen Hilary Page's brick as a sample from a molding machine vendor. Lego previously made wooden toys (until his son Godtfred allegedly set the factory on fire) and was casting about for what production to invest in for the future.
The Kiddicraft brick was a little rectangular box, no tubes inside. A lot of brick toys came out in the 60s that were little shells with varying clutch power.
I think this comes from higher tonnage (clamp force) molding machines. Injected plastic exerts force at the mold seam. Pressing the mold open by even a teeny tiny amount is unpalatable. Mold lines also can result where a mold has insertable parts, like sliding rods to form inner holes.
stickers
> just looks cheap due to different surfaces and colors
They are cheap!
To print on a piece you must run the inkjet assembly line, do QC on it.. With early Collectable Minifig series, I heard they outsourced that. I imagine inkjet lines that run all day for one piece type (maybe having changeable jigs.)
It's cheap to print a whole sheet of stickers!
Another approach that isn't so cheap is: in-mold transfer printing sheets. I learned about this at plastics shows around 2000; Apple used it on the all-in-one spotted iMac in 2001-ish.
Now since Lego ships perpetually ships 1x4s and 1x2s with black smileys or such, I guess carbon black in-mold transfer must be cost-effective. (That's a guess)
I know we're gonna be arguing taste in stickers forever.
Another detail: National Instruments declined to update the Mindstorms software. Just wasn't a profitable business case. (The LabView vi libraries, I dunno if they worked past 2015.. I stopped upgrading.)
I finally had the time to get back into FRC mentoring last year, for just one season. I changed jobs and had to move across the country before this season started. I miss it dearly.
I hate app obsolescence, and licenses that expire on your old hardware (Microsoft Word..) I exhibit 1980s video games. The hardware just continues to work. It's a disgrace what happens to mobile games, they just disappear. (Whattaya do, save all your old phones? I'm hating on you, Atari Classics app on iPad 2; revoked my paid license to use it.)
But to be fair, Lego has gone to great lengths to keep their companion software alive. Still, the nature of mobile: apps require constant updates to stay listed for new OS versions.
For one, Lego Commander existed uselessly on my phone long after it ceased to work... until one iOS it wouldn't install anymore.
Lego giving you a CD with software and instruction was a comfort (challenge: find a CD drive!) but only Mindstorms really.
For desktop apps in the 2010s, Lego relied on Silverlight to get Mac and PC compatibility. So what happens when you rely on a Microsoft framework... still as late as 2015 I was still able to download Mindstorms 2.0 (introduced 2002??) from Lego.
With instructions pdfs, Lego has been ok to let hobbyists reproduce the downloads (last I saw.)
Another thing Lego did was to provide SDKs for Mindstorms (a while after the community reverse-engineered a lot of it...). Opening it up that way was encouraging. (Lego even started distributing HiTechnic's 3rd party sensors, the folks that reverse-engineered the Mindstorms 1.0 RCX.)
I was part of the fan movement from 1998-2001 that hammered on the message for Lego to open things up. What happened is that they hired several of us :)
>A 2x4 LEGO brick manufactured in 1958 will snap perfectly onto a brick molded this morning..
This is just manifestly NOT TRUE. The outward appearance may be the same. There were intentional improvements to the walls and tubes that make fit less than perfect. Generally, today's brick requires less force to snap and un-snap, because the compression is focused onto fewer points. (I guess this lowers the "hoop strength".)
Older bricks can be either: completely loose, or clutch so hard to each other they are the devil to take apart.
I have many bricks from 1962 onwards. The oldest 2x4s and 2x2s were made of cellulose acetate (CA) (in North America, intermediated by Samsonite.) CA were softer, and either had less clutch power to begin with, or lost it over time. When I got them in the 70s, they fit but wouldn't reliably stick to each other, nor later 70s-80s bricks (all ABS plastic by then.) (CA bricks were mostly red, and they have a pale orange tint.)
70s-80s bricks did not always age well. Aged 1x4 or 1x8 bricks can have the outer wall bowed inward slightly. This is a mold engineering problem anyway. Later, 80s bricks were improved by slightly thinner walls and some reinforcing tabs. The older, aged bricks can stick brutally to each other and to newer bricks.
The 10x10 baseplates didn't age well (these were once box-tops! Tog'l Toys also had the baseplate as a box-lid.) Possibly made of polycarbonate (PC). Other large plates in ABS-- for instance 6x16 (Auto Chassis, red) -- have warped. They were also more brittle to begin with.
So inside Brick geometry has changed over the decades. 60s-70s bricks are closer to plain boxes with tubes inside - as the Kiddicraft prototype of the 50s. In the 80s, the outer walls got thinner and had tiny studs where the studs contacted the wall. And the tubes changed from cylinders to just slightly clover-leaf inside, so that a tube over a single stud now formed 4 points of contact, and came apart with lower shear force. (I believe this also made it easier to pry a plate off of a larger plate.)
I have Fabuland sets from early 80s, whose plain bricks are so stiff, they are positively brutal to snap onto each other or 90s bricks.
The brick geometry of today is much improved. And the ABS is more "plastic", perhaps more "B" (butadiene rubber) or less "S" (styrene): I can drill it more cleanly.
Mid 80s and 90s bricks will interoperate just fine with today's. But bricks from before that period didn't age so well (and their corners, I believe, used to be harder.)
> My kids have a photographic memory of each of those special pieces and which set they came from. They’ll remember them and search until they find that exact piece
I had the same skill (still do). Imagine following the instructions the first time. A part you're encountering for the first time stimulates the memory. I knew my collection like a dragon's hoard. For instance, I owned twelve white 1x2 tiles, all from Coast Guard Station, so that was the limiting piece when building tiny space-fighters...
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