[msarnoff]

The ancestor of the RCX was the "programmable brick" project out of the MIT Media Lab in the mid-1990s

http://archive.pbrick.info/The%20MIT%20Programmable%20Brick%...

https://web.archive.org/web/20011212030110/http://fredm.www....

Growing up in New England at the time, I was very lucky that they ran a pilot project at my elementary school. We programmed our "sketches" (though we didn't use this term) in LogoWriter on Mac LC IIs and flashed them using a weird dongle that connected to the brick via RJ11 cable.

I owe a lot to my teachers and Fred Martin's group. I don't think I'd be a developer today without that experience.

[alexjplant]

I was fortunate enough to get LEGO Mindstorms (the OG one) for Christmas as a kid. By that time I'd already learned a bit of QBasic and so had programming experience. While I found the visual programming paradigm limiting I also wasn't creative enough to come up with robots that needed more than what one could build with the software so I had no complaints. I had a great time learning about gear ratios and how flaky the light sensor was depending upon room brightness.

Is there anything similar and as well-supported from Lego or otherwise these days? An ESP32 is great fun but some assembly is required.