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The Old Robots Web Site

by jfil on 9/2/25, 2:43 AM with 37 comments

  • by wgrover on 9/5/25, 1:53 PM

    A parenting tip for those with geeky kids:

    You can get some of these (like the smaller TOMY robots) for pretty cheap on eBay. They're usually broken, but the innards of these robots are so interesting, just taking them apart is a learning experience. TOMY was brilliant at making seemingly sophisticated toys that were actually run by a single DC motor; all the movements, sounds, sensing etc. were implemented using gears and cam shafts and other mechanisms. A great way to learn about simple machines, and a bonus if you (or your kid) can repair them and bring a 40-year-old robot back to life.

  • by EvanAnderson on 9/5/25, 1:18 PM

    I love and miss when the web had a higher concentration of focused, individually curated sites like this one. It's a sort of charming and quaint electronic folk art. I can sense the love and attention that went into creating it.

  • by solstice on 9/5/25, 1:51 PM

    Oh wow, the second link I randomly clicked turned out to be the one on the Mr. Money toy robot I had as a child: https://www.theoldrobots.com/mrmoney.html What a "coin"cidence (ba-dum-tss). It's probably still somewhere in the attic.

  • by krapp on 9/5/25, 9:20 PM

    One of the books I was obsessed with from my small town public library was simply titled "Robots" and it had some of these, including Odex1[0] which I still think is one of the cooler old-style robot designs, and AROK[1] which is the best, objectively, suck it Boston Dynamics and Elon. Unfortunately it's impossible to Google that book now.

    I was obsessed with the Omnibot 2000, and for the brief and terrible time I was a Scout, I wanted to build the Gizmo robot in Boy's Life[2] but it was just a trash can with a motor. It bothered me to no end that Androbot[3,4] had no arms. The only real robot-type thing I actually had was an Armatron (the grey version.)

    [0]https://www.theoldrobots.com/odex.html

    [1]https://www.blackgate.com/2019/07/31/arok-the-robot/

    [2]https://www.theoldrobots.com/GismoRobot.html

    [3]https://www.theoldrobots.com/bob.html

    [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topo_%28robot%29

    I miss when the future was fun. Now we're going to get robots but they'll be designed to put us out of work or shoot us dead in the streets, and none of them will look nearly as interesting.

  • by teddyh on 9/5/25, 5:05 PM

    Previously on HN: The Old Robots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17159653 - May 2018 (15 comments)

  • by bhollis on 9/5/25, 6:56 PM

    Neat, they have Newt, the robot my dad built that was the first mobile robot with its own onboard computer. Newt is still there in his basement, and as a kid I did science fair projects programming behaviors for it. At that point the computer had been upgraded to a Motorola 68K. https://www.theoldrobots.com/Newt.html

  • by owenversteeg on 9/5/25, 6:41 PM

    Wow, talk about a blast of nostalgia. I had a few of those as a kid. I do see one popular robot missing, Mr. Robot by Westminster, which could shoot foam discs, walk around, dance, and rotate his head. Seems like they have a similar robot: http://www.theoldrobots.com/StarDefender3.html

  • by wkjagt on 9/5/25, 5:43 PM

    Some of these, including one I had as a kid, produce sound through a small gramophone inside. No electronic amplification at all, just a needle on a tiny "record", mechanically connected to some kind of speaker shaped cone.

    Here's someone taking apart the exact robot I had, and showing that mechanism: https://www.windytan.com/2013/02/the-atomic-powered-robot.ht...

  • by schnaars on 9/5/25, 5:45 PM

    Missing Pulsar from Pulsations Night Club outside Philadelphia. In the 80's, it would deliver cocaine and cocktails to people. I think that it was also the robot from one of the Rocky movies too.

    https://youtu.be/uB4FqfIX9JY?si=VokrpZM8xAhLxdVN&t=184

    Crazy times growing up back then.

  • by flippyhead on 9/5/25, 1:28 PM

    Wow this was fun! I had no idea Bushnell (the atari guy) tried his hand at robots: https://www.theoldrobots.com/bob.html

  • by pmcjones on 9/12/25, 1:53 PM

    I had this one in the 1950s: https://www.theoldrobots.com/Ideal.html

  • by floren on 9/5/25, 5:30 PM

    As a robot-obsessed kid I remember surveying a lot of these (I definitely read through this site at one point too) and realizing, damn, they really are all toys. I'm not sure any of them actually could do anything useful, even the ones with robot arms because those robot arms were always incredibly imprecise.

  • by dumbfounder on 9/6/25, 1:16 PM

  • by ge96 on 9/5/25, 9:50 PM

    That John Deere walker is nuts

  • by brk on 9/5/25, 5:22 PM

    No mention of the HERO-1? Seems like a huge gap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HERO_(robot)

  • by chris_st on 9/5/25, 2:44 PM

    Nice demonstration of the Tokima Robot Watch: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Nlqk9YtQFSo

  • by pkdpic on 9/5/25, 6:30 PM

    I just want to say this is an amazing resource and I'm planning to share it with my 5yo son's computer club. Would be super interested if anyone has any similar resources.

  • by lawlessone on 9/5/25, 7:39 PM

    The robot arms from decades ago look the same as todays, slightly different choice of colours but thats it.

  • by endymion-light on 9/5/25, 1:42 PM

    thanks for this - this has inspired me to try and do a rebuild of the tokima robot watch, have a bunch of microcontrollers and screens lying around, and need to make them into a little robot buddy

  • by K0balt on 9/5/25, 2:16 PM

    Holy crap. I realized that I have had, at one time or another, at least 8 of these robots before my 20s, all of them I tried to improve in one way or another, which got me started on the at2313 (?) chip from armed and started my microcontroller journey. Before that I was either programming on my 6502 machine or designing logic and chips processors on my own “ISA” lol.

  • by rolph on 9/5/25, 7:35 PM

    i didnt see BigTrak in there.

    should it be a robot? or was it just a kewltoy/LOGO primer ?

  • by mediumsmart on 9/5/25, 2:11 PM

    beeeaauuuutiiifuuul