Gakken Mini Blocks - Blink and You Miss It

I discovered sadly that Gakken made a cute little version of their EX system called Gakken Mini Blocks, but they stopped making them before I noticed.  I think this is so neat.  I blogged about my love of the Gakken Denshi Blocks a long time back.  See http://microcomputing.blogspot.com/2007/

Some people are selling these on ebay, but they are discontinued.  :-(  Too bad.

Here is a photo.

I also found a link to a video about it.  The presenter explains the product and assembles a simple computer circuit.

Electronic Flip-Flop

Early users of computers were usually also interested in electronics, and in fact I was a casual student of electronics before I knew what a computer is. So I owned a couple of electronic experimenter's labs (and I still do) that we picked up at the You-Do-It Electronics store.

Particularly interesting was the Gakken Denshi Block system, recently reintroduced to the market. This is a high quality kit with a portable radio style case. It has a transparent lid which you open to place pluggable modules.

Here is a photo of my own kit (rebranded as Skilcraft).

One of the experiments was important to my understanding of computers. It was titled Bistable Circuit with Two Lamp. This was another was of saying Flip-Flop, which is a critical building block of digital computers. Up until this point I had only an abstract concept of how a Flip-Flop actually worked.

Here is a link to an article on Wikipedia explaining what a Flip-Flop is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-flop_%28electronics%29