It consisted of a circular piece of plastic that had pictures of different animals running around it. In the centre of the toy there was a plastic arrow with a picture of a farmer on it. You turned the arrow to point at a particular animal, let’s say the cow, then pulled a string on the side which caused the arrow to spin around like mad and for the toy to utter the words “The cow says… Moo!”.

Somehow this toy mesmerised me. Perhaps it was the hypnotic spin of the arrow, or more likely just the crackly pronunciation of the recorded voice, but I sat there twisting the arrow and pulling the string until I had heard everything the farmer had to say, much to the annoyance of my mate who probably wanted to go off and play with toy cars or something with me.

A little on the history of this toy then to finish off. The first version was released in 1965 by Mattel and the sounds were stored on a little plastic disc, a bit like an old vinyl record. It has undergone surprisingly few revisions over time, with the first major change being replacing the pull string with a lever in the late Eighties. This change occured after a little girl was blinded by the string snapping and flicking into her eye.

The modern version appears to have more sounds to choose from now, as the ring with the animals on it is now a hinged piece of plastic which can be flipped over like the pages of a book. Apparently the exact same animal sounds are still used in it, although they are now digitised onto a computer chip rather than etched into a plastic disc.

In 1964 that started to change, with the release of the Moog (named after its creator Robert Moog) which was the first commercially available instrument of its kind. The first band to release an album featuring Moog created music was The Monkees, but they were soon followed by other notables including The Rolling Stones, The Doors and The Beatles.

The Moog created its sound by allowing the user of it to layer together simple waveforms of different kinds, such as sine waves. In doing so the sound created by the instrument could be changed to achieve a wide number of different effects.

In 1979 the Synthesizer market was shaken up again with the release of the Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument) as it took a different approach. The advent of micro computers allowed the Fairlight to work by using sampled sounds of real instruments, meaning that in theory at least it could sound like any instrument you wanted it to.

However the Fairlight and similar synthesizers still cost a huge amount of money when they first appeared, so remained the preserve of professional musicians, with probably Jean Michel Jarre being the artist who is most often linked with the Fairlight.

Back in the home however, we were pretty much still stuck with our old Bontempi Air Organs or expensive piano sized organs, until the clever bods at companies such as Yamaha and Casio came along and size and cost reduced the innards of a synthesizer onto a microchip.

By the mid-eighties you couldn’t walk into a branch of Dixons without seeing a stand of more affordable synthesizer keyboards left out for demo purposes. There wasn’t a kid in the land who couldn’t resist heading over to the stand for a little fiddle, first plinking and plonking out a load of noises by stabbing at the keys, then locating the demo button (which for some reason always seemed to play Wham’s Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go) and pretending that they had suddenly become a piano whizz in the hope that their parents might buy them one.

These home synthesizers were available in a wide number of configurations, with different sized keyboards (from two octaves upwards), different numbers of built in instruments, the ability to sample your own sounds through a built in microphone. Most also featured a usually terrible sounding array of “boom-diddy-ba-boom” type backing tracks.

Another useful ability was to be able to record the notes you played and then play them back again later to check for where you were making mistakes. Some models even then you play back the recording bit by bit by tapping any key on the keyboard, so you could enter the notes correctly first, then get the timing right afterwards.

I’m talking about the Skip-It, which basically consisted of a rotating plastic ball on a length of flexible plastic that was attached at the other end to a plastic ring. You placed one foot into the ring, then by skipping up and down you could get the ball rotating around your leg. You then had to skip over the long chain-like part of the toy whenever it came round by your other foot.

Whilst I can’t prove that the ball and chain was the inspiration behind this toy, it seems pretty likely given that it looks exactly like one and was worn in the same way!

The Skip-It first appeared in the Eighties and became one of those instant fad toys that everyone wanted to have, and before long there were many badly constructed but cheaper copies of it in the shops, and children up and down the country were tripping over themselves trying to master the action required to keep the ball in motion.

In the early Nineties the popularity of the Skip-It was on the wane, but the makers then had to great idea of adding a counter to the ball which kept track of how many times it had been swirled round your ankle. A great idea, assuming it was accurate of course, as it then meant you had the aim of trying to beat your highest score, and you could compete with your friends to be the playground Skip-It champion too!

Starbird was a space ship toy which looked the business. It was sleek and groovy looking, just like one of the ships from Star Wars, and it could be pulled apart and converted into a smaller mini space ship as well. Best of all those was the fact that it made sound effects!

After switching Starbird on it would start to make a futuristic sounding engine noise. Tip the nose of the ship upwards though and the noise changed to sound like it was accelerating to climb higher, whilst tipping the nose down made it sound like it was decelerating. OK, this was all a bit nonsensical for a space ship, but it sounded cool.

Even better though was the little button on the top that fired the Starbird laser cannons. As well as playing a laser blast sound, some little lights under the lasers came on as well.

As if that wasn’t cool enough, the Starbird even went through a little revamp and was re-released as the Starbird Avenger. This had all the same functions as the original, but could also send and receive infra-red. It came with a reflective target which you could then practice shooting at, in a similar manner to the way Laser Tag worked.

Also joining the range was the Starbird Intruder. This was a smaller ship made out of black coloured plastic (so you could easily say that Starbirds were from the good guys, since they were white, and the Intruder was the baddies). The Intruder had the same electronic functions though, and it was then possible to have space battles. If you were able to hit your opponent with the infra red beam it would briefly make the engine noise stop to register a hit.

Sadly I never got any of these toys, though now I’m all grown up I think I can understand the reason why. Firstly, the price (they were quite expensive as I recall) and secondly, the fact that to adult ears it would soon have become incredibly irritating, as this video clip of somebody playing with their old Starbird clearly shows…

Gobots actually started life in Japan (where else) as the Machine Robo series of toys, slightly before the Transformers even came into existence. In 1983 western toy manufacturer Tonka licensed the toys for the US market, and renamed them Gobots in the process.

Sales of the toys were initially very good, as the concept resonated with many a young lad. However, when Hasbro launched Transformers the Gobots suffered. This can be attributed to many things, but ultimately the Transformers toys were just a whole lot cooler. The Transformers looked more robotic an futuristic in many cases that their Gobot cousins, and they had better names too. Where the Transformers had Optimus Prime and Starscream, Gobots had Scooter and Tank (no prizes for guessing what they transformed into).

Another area in which the Transformers excelled was with their design and backstory. The look of the toys, their packaging and eventual cartoon told a coherent story and it was easy to see the strengths and weaknesses of each robot from the statistics printed on the box. The Gobots tended to look a little more chunky and basic looking, although some had very complex transformation seqences that easily rivalled those of certain Transformers toys.

The last new Gobot toys were released in 1987, and they had to concede defeat to their more famous cousins, but the story doesn’t quite end there. In 1991 Hasbro bought out Tonka, which gave them ownership of the Gobots brand, although not the toys themselves as they were only made under license from Bandai in Japan.

Hasbro confusingly went on to use the Gobots name as part of the Transformers line up in no less than three different ways. First, they released a Transformer named Gobots, then there were a sub-range of toys named Go-Bots, then finally a range aimed at younger children (released under Hasbro’s Playskool label) called Transformers: Gobots.

Created by Texas Instruments in 1978, the Speak & Spell became one of the most recognisable and popular educational toys during the 1980s. As its name suggests, it was intended to help children learn how to spell. Spelling is one of those areas that was hard to turn into a toy, since it’s not like you could print “Spell Librarian” on a card and give it to a child, since they’d then have the correct spelling right there in front of them. Again, as the name suggests, this problem was solved by making the toy speak.

Speak & Spell used a technique called speech synthesis in order to make itself heard. This was a very new area of technology back when the toy was created and was not without its flaws (indeed, even today synthesised speech is quite often blatantly obvious due to mispronounced words) so whilst it was incredibly clever, it was also not exactly that easy to be able to make out what word the device was actually asking you to spell. You often got quite a few wrong answers simply because you were entering the correct spelling of the wrong word.

If you want to hear what I’m talking about then head over to the Speak & Spell Online site, which features an emulator of the Speak & Spell which whilst it may not be functionally complete (its missing game modes for example) it sounds exactly like the original.

This little problem didn’t stop the toy doing very well indeed, and it lasted right into the Nineties. It was also successful outside of the USA because it had been given a modular design. Cartridges containing new libraries of words could be plugged into the unit, and cartridges were also made for languages other than English. Other languages that were maded available were French, Spanish, German, Italian and, perhaps surprisingly, Japanese!

The Speak & Spell also gave rise to two other similar products. First there was the Speak & Math (or Speak & Maths if you’re British) which took the same speech synthesis technology and applied it to mathematics. The Speak & Math looked almost identical to the Speak & Spell except it was grey instead of orange, and obviously had number keys instead of letters.

The Speak & Read (which I must admit I don’t ever remember seeing) aimed to help children learn to read, and looked even more like the original Speak & Spell, except for its colour scheme, as it was yellow rather than orange.

In later years the toys were redesigned and given a new screen, replacing the old original pocket calculator style green segmented display with a black and white LCD version. The toys were also made a lot thinner in the process, but somehow the redesign lost a lot of the charm of the original.

For most of the Eighties, in the UK at least, there were four main contenders – the Commodore 64, the ZX Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC and the BBC Micro – but there were many more besides including the Dragon 32, the ZX81, the Vic-20 and today’s spotlighted machine, the Oric-1.

The Oric-1 was created by UK computer firm Tangerine Computer Systems, although it was marketed under the company name of Oric Products International. It was aimed fair and square at the ZX Spectrum end of the market, as it was of a similar size and shape, and came in both 16K and 48K versions, just like the Spectrum did, and was even sold for just about the same price.

It did also improve on the Spectrum in many ways too. First it had a better keyboard than the original Spectrum (although that wasn’t really that hard an achievement!) although it has to be said the keys were a lot smaller in size. It had better sound capabilities and a higher resolution screen too.

One thing it did keep in common with the Spectrum though was an unreliable method of loading and saving programs, that being a standard cassette tape recorder.

The Oric-1 hit the market in 1983 and sold over 200,000 units in the UK and France. This was enough to allow further development of the system and the following year saw the Oric Atmos born to the world.

The Oric Atmos looked like a great improvement externally, primarily due to it having a far far better keyboard than its siblings. However, whilst its operating system did see some improvements there was actually very little else to distinguish the Atmos from the Oric-1.

Whilst Oric Products did announce further systems beyond these, including the Oric Stratos and Oric Telestrat, neither really took off. The company went into liquidation the day after the Stratos was demonstrated for the first time in public, and whilst the Stratos did eventually get released under the auspices of French company Eureka, it never caught on and the Oric name became consigned to the great computer industry list of also rans.

There’s something completely irresistible about these toys. Put them in the hands of even the biggest pacifist and the urge to pull the trigger whilst aiming it at somebody to give them a little squirting becomes near impossible to stop.

The fact that the average water pistol was made out of transparent plastic is also a master stroke, as it means a quick glance is all that is needed to see whether you should be planning a quick retreat to the nearest tap for a reload any time soon.

In my day you couldn’t get much more than a simple pocket money water pistol like the one that illustrates this post, but these days water pistol design has really gone to town with things like the Super Soaker range.

These new weapons of mass soaking boast vastly increased water tank capacity, with detachable bottles which you fill with water and then screw back onto the gun. Many also feature a pump facility which allows the gun to put the water under far greater pressure and thus increase your range and the power of the water jet immensely.

Whilst these new fangled guns may be a lot more cool (and have a higher price tag to match), there’s something reassuring about the fact that the good old fashioned kind still have one advantage over their bigger cousins – it’s far easier to do a stealth soaking as it’s possible to hide the gun far more easily behind your back!