What a blast from the past. I remember the finicky IR tower for uploading programs.

I failed abysmally at programming my Mindstorms robot. I could never figure out how to make two things happen at the same time, so I couldn't make both motors run at once. As a result, my treaded robot could only spin in circles.

Sadly, that was pretty much the end of my experience with Mindstorms. Eventually, I gave up and put it away, because it was such a frustrating experience.

I assume it would be easier for kids these days. It was a lot more difficult to find help on the internet in 1999.

Yeah, the bundled software for the RCX was pretty awful, and was Windows-only. That's why I used brickOS, which let me write C (or was it C++?) code to run on the RCX, and it also worked on Linux.

The next generation, "NXT", was somewhat better (I believe it's based on LabView), but I remember it being ridiculously slow and unstable on Macs.

One of my kids uses Lego's "SPIKE Prime" at their robotics club, and while I haven't used the software myself, it seems much better.

> Eventually, I gave up and put it away, because it was such a frustrating experience.

Wasn't there a cheat sheet in the manual for the puzzles? I think I only solved one without copying everything. Way too hard for 11-12yo me.

> As an aside I'm pretty sure my RCX IR towers use serial, not USB.

Both versions exist. Mindstorms 1.0/1.5 had serial IR towers, 2.0 had USB.