[ricard]

When I see Sue's beautiful creation above it brings back memories of my own Lego age when I was young as the 1960s turned into the 1970s. There is a consistent chunkiness of the media (the actual pieces) which inspires in a way that modern day Lego with its enormous variety of pieces and colours does not.

Trying to remain on topic here without going too philosophical, the thing that strikes me about 'classic Lego' is the simplicity of the pieces, belying the underlaying complexity of actually manufacturing plastic components which not only have to fit together in a number of ways, but also have to maintain a consistent production quality so that all pieces to in fact fit together in a consistent way.

Going back to my favorite reel-to-reel period, roughly 1955 to 1965, there is parallel in that again there is a simplicity for the user belying an underlying technical complexity. In the 1950s, just the fact that it was possible to record sound onto a ribbon of plastic was fascination in itself which still follows me. Today of course, if an average consumer wants to record something, there are numerous apps and applications which can record anything from a simple voice memo to a 48 track composition at the touch of a button (and at virtually no cost too), losing the fascination for the actual record-reproduce process.

I haven't been seriously into Lego since my childhood days, but I do remember actually starting to build something which looked like a tape recorder in the early 70s; I remember that there weren't any reasonably round flat pieces that I could have made reel holders with. It never got much further than that, and a bit into the 70s I lost interest in modeling things in Lego, going over to model trains instead, and economy permitted the purchase of "real" tape recorders, which were to be had second hand for next to nothing in those days as cassettes were in and reel-to-reels out.