You know that computers have taken over your life when they invade the Happy Meal. The evolution of the Happy Meal toy has been a fun one to watch. The Happy Meal chatchki has slowly evolved from a simple piece of injection molded crap, to a piece of injection molded crap that lights up, to a piece of injection molded crap with a microprocessor. The first microprocessors I noticed in the Happy Meal were used to make some Disney character talk. It didn't demonstrate much silicon horsepower, but there was a chip in there. But the latest Happy Meal toy is a different story. It is a full fledged video game. It's not a very complicated one, but it's a video game nonetheless. It has an LCD screen. It has animation. It beeps in multiple tones. And there's real game play. Frankly, it's not that much less sophisticated than the handheld football game I used to play for hours on end as a kid.
The microprocessor has come an incredibly long way when it is inexpensive enough to make its way into millions of throwaway toys that come free with a $2.98 meal. It bodes well for the evolution of technologies like RFID that will require the manufacture of microprocessors on massive scale at a cost of a fraction of a penny. The power of Moore's law never ceases to amaze me. But I suspect it will be second nature to my Happy Meal eating kids.
In 1980 I was working for a high tech marketing consultancy in Richmond, just south of London, England. National Semiconductor was a client who had a new product - a voice chip that they wanted to launch into the European marketplace.
In order to give us something to demonstrate, they sent us ........a coffee pot......that said.....would you like some tea?
It's worth noting that this was 23 years ago.
Posted by: Guyjean | 07/14/2003 at 09:57 AM
"throwaway"? I hadn't thought that far yet (my kids have been the joyful recipients of McProcessors), but it suddenly occurred to me what this means for our landfills. We have restrictions on throwing out traditional computers... but that is getting off-topic.
Posted by: Lance | 07/14/2003 at 02:25 PM
I have about 30-40 of these things all around the house. My son loves them. My second thought on this was if they could create a simple device like a Palm that could be "sensed" when kids brought it back in the store. The device could be a good way to keep kids coming back. Using RFID in a reverse way and having a way to track kid's habits across stores. They then could register the device on a web site and store points. Could be a big thing in the future.
Posted by: Chris Woodruff | 07/15/2003 at 08:33 AM
Wow, I really did throw it away and didn't even think twice.
Posted by: may | 07/17/2003 at 11:53 PM
How about the operating system for all these devices? Probably Japan's Tron, which is now estimated to be in 4 billion devices around the world. MS Windows is only running on 150 million machines.
nice piece today on the creator of Tron and his views on Microsoft:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/businessstorydisplay.cfm?storyID=3513518
Posted by: Al | 07/20/2003 at 10:54 AM