VTech and computing

I don't think I've met anyone else who is several years older than me, as a 22yr old who remembers the time before your parents granted you a computer; you had something less advanced, yet you still did the usual computing stuff.

The brand in particular may very well be familiar to you as a child. VTech is known for their Laser 128, IQ Unlimited and the like. But in this case, I'm talking about the I.T Unlimited and the I.T Laptop and the Impact. These are kids toys, yes... However, the charm's within what these toys were actually capable of. Notably, only the basics such as programming (LOGO and BASIC), spreadsheet, word processing, printing and most cases emailing. For printing, these sported parallel ports and for data transfer, a serial port. To make it more interesting, these toys also sported what appeared to be preloaded drivers for the printers listed. There were over a dozen parallel printers within that list.

Before I go off-tangent on just one part of the subject, this is more about how that's kind of changed since the mid 2000s. Kids using tablets, smartwatches and "smartphones". There's no interest in actual computing to the majority. It's not surprising how developers and hardware developers do things such as the Raspberry Pi with the CANO/KANO to encourage children to get into computing.

Looking at VTech back in, let's say, 1998 and 1999. VTech did their part in kid's computing with the I.T Laptop. Sold in 1998, it had all the bells and whistles of an actual computer. Be printing, spreadsheets, word processing and email, even some BASIC programming. Considering the amount of them on eBay I've seen over the years, I could say it was almost adequate. The downer was the lack of a backlight, making it almost useless if you are in overcast and in dim-lit rooms. It was advertised with the capability of email and newsgroups. Unfortunately due to the scarcity of the official accessories of these things, I cannot try for myself. So, this is a pursuit of mine I wish to accomplish just for the novelty.

At this point in 2017, I currently own 4 VTech toys capable of (or previously capable, as modems and printers are borderline non-existent) some barebone networking and correspondence. I was also hoping if anyone else here remembers anything of the sort back in their day.

The brains of the toys

VTech's I.T Laptop was interesting to partially disassemble. What I discovered was actually surprising. As it's a kid's toy marketed for 12 to 16yr olds in the US and UK, it is eligible to be called an actual computer. The brains of actual laptop is of course seen in PDAs and I believe certain portables of the 90s. The I.T Laptop actually sports a Motorola FreeScale DragonBall CPU (left) as the heart. There were ROM chips and RAM chips here and there, the storage for the "C:"[ATTACH=CONFIG]47196[/ATTACH] drive and memory for programs. It appeared to sport around several megabytes of storage and RAM. Most seemed to be branded from AMD and in-house.

Unfortunately, I wouldn't even dare myself to attempt to run a different OS on the kid's laptop because something is bound to go belly-up. But it is interesting to note that the TV counterpart (I.T Unlimited) also sported a Motorola CPU and another large chip right in the middle of the board, but I've no image of that because internally there's another board covering that chip.