Lego Secret Vault Contains All Sets In History 266
An anonymous reader writes "Gizmodo has an exclusive video and feature of one of the most heavily guarded secrets in Lego: the security vault where they store all the Lego sets ever created, new in their boxes. 4,720 sets from 1953 to 2008. Really amazing stuff and a trip down memory lane to every person who has played with the magic bricks. All combined, the collection must be worth millions, not only because of the collector value, but also because Lego uses it as a safeguard in copyright and patent cases."
cool tour, but no real surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFS
Re:cool tour, but no real surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Still, it's pretty cool. Even if it is useful for trademark cases, you have to figure that sets from 50 years ago are there mostly just for the awesome historic value and as inspiration to the engineers.
Re:cool tour, but no real surprise (Score:5, Funny)
Re:cool tour, but no real surprise (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
'Modded "Informative"? Really? It sounds like it was meant to be a joke.'
You obviously don't know Microsoft ;^)
Re:cool tour, but no real surprise (Score:5, Funny)
Given Microsoft's history on security, if they *did* have a vault, I'd guess it would be made from Lego.
Re:cool tour, but no real surprise (Score:5, Funny)
Re:cool tour, but no real surprise (Score:5)
that is why i use underrated
Re:cool tour, but no real surprise (Score:5, Informative)
No karma for underrated, either, because there is no meta-moderation on under and overrated.
Re:cool tour, but no real surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
well damn then.. i have been waisting alot of mod points..
Re:cool tour, but no real surprise (Score:5, Funny)
No, he means that mod points are fattening.
Re:cool tour, but no real surprise (Score:5, Informative)
One would think this is the case, but many companies fail this. It takes an archivists' mindset to institute this as policy in the early days of a small company.
In fact I know that Microsoft was pretty bad about this in years past. Even though storage is cheap, they have had to ask employees for old products like MS-DOS 1.1 or MS-DOS 2.0 floppies from time to time, as the official archivists were unable to produce the "silvers" (copies from their golden masters sent to reproduction) or in fact any boxed copies at all.
Re:cool tour, but no real surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
It may take an archivist's mindset to preserve a complete history of Lego or other manufactured product. But software? All you need are regular backups. The problem is that when geeks start a new enterprise, they try to do their own IT, and the boring stuff, like backups, doesn't get done.
Also, before the Internet came along and made everybody need to be online and IP-compatible, most computers weren't networked, and those that were used a lot of different technologies. So basically there was no way a machine was going to get backed up unless the department it belonged thought to take care of it.
Small wonder that so much old software has just disappeared.
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Re:cool tour, but no real surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm wondering what Lego holds patents on? Also, what patents they once held that have expired? I remember Legos from when I was a kid, and I'm over 50. The design patent on the original blocks has to have expired long ago.
Re:cool tour, but no real surprise (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think they had patents. They tried using Trade Mark infringement law to prevent competition, but lost [www.cbc.ca] in Canada.
Re:cool tour, but no real surprise (Score:5, Informative)
Whoops! I'm WRONG. They did have patents which expired in Canada in 1988. The Trade Mark dispute they did lose, however.
(Goes and beats himself with fanfold paper).
Patents (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, even though LEGO famously patented the basic stud-and-tube brick design decades ago, the company has filed for numerous patents since then on all sorts of things.
You can view them on Google's Patent Search. Many are filed by INTERLEGO AG of Switzerland.
http://www.google.com/patents?q=interlego&btnG=Search+Patents
Among other things, LEGO has patented the track and car designs from its monorail system, a "brick vacuum" for picking up bricks, and a linear actuator system that is going to be used in the 2008 LEGO Technic sets released this fall.
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You would think that but this is not the rule... (Score:5, Insightful)
What Lego has here is more the exception to the rule.
And on a separate note, am I the only one here horrified to see these people handling these boxes with their bare hands. For crying out loud, I hope they at least made that guy wash his hands first before letting him finger everything up.
Sheesh.
Re:You would think that but this is not the rule.. (Score:4, Insightful)
You're one of those people that never played with his toys but kept them in the original box for collector's value, right?
I never got that idea. It's a toy. Play with it! That's what it was made for. Yes, that means they ain't in "mint" condition after a while, but they gave me a lot of fun and very fond memories. No money in the world could compensate that.
Re:You would think that but this is not the rule.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm with you on this one, and I smashed the shit out of a lot of what would probably have been very valuable collector's items in my youth, all in the name of fun, but I do understand the collectors' mindset.
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These are archival copies of things that may not exist in such a pristine state anywhere anymore. How the poster uses their own toys, particularly NOW as opposed to when they were a child, is irrelevant. I'd be willing to bet that you have, to others, a weird fetish or two yourself. All the interesting people do anyway.
Re:You would think that but this is not the rule.. (Score:4, Interesting)
These aren't toys any longer; they are artifacts. If you're serious about keeping your artifacts around, you need to remember this.
I volunteer at the Computer History Museum, and they're very particular about this. Wearing white cotton gloves as you pick up an old Atari joystick may seem silly, but that's the rule. There's very little information about how long plastics will last, so keep your grubby little fingers off.
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Actually I played with all of my toys quite a bit and some of them got destroyed in the process. That's not the point, and as others have already countered... These are not toys. This is an official corporate archive of products.
These are effectively one of a kind items for their intended purpose so you would think that extra care would be taken with them in this context.
The oils on human skin are quite destructive. Case in point, don't wash your hands for part of the day and then pick up any magazine and s
Re:These are different (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should I? What do you think I am, the government?
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Indeed?! [genua.de]
CC.
Bonus points if... (Score:5, Funny)
They would have totally gotten bonus points in my book if the vault and locking mechanism were actually made of Legos. It's totally doable (people have made far bigger things out of Legos), but probably insecure if you can just cut through the Legos with a Sawz-All. Still, it would have been nice if they'd made it LOOK like it were made of Legos. The Lego signs are a nice touch along those lines.
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It's totally doable (people have made far bigger things out of Legos), but probably insecure if you can just cut through the Legos with a Sawz-All.
Would it be considered cheating to make the vault legos out of steel, or any other non-plastic material? I personally think that'd be fine. And yes, it would be worth a lot of bonus points. :)
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i would love to have a set of metal legos
get them in diffrent alloys.. make a car.. could be fun
Re:Bonus points if... (Score:5, Informative)
I'd sell that idea to them.
I could see them creating a 1:1 car model out of metal that actually works. But ... knowing how they changed in the years, the kit would probably consist of 10 parts that only fit together how they "should". No generics, just prefabricated reassembly kits.
It's a shame, really. I loved the old "generic" Legos a lot more. Maybe with a handful of "special" parts (that could still be used in other ways). Oh, it changed so much in the past 20 years...
'scuse me while I go mourn.
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Its a nice idea, but I think the only reason why LEGO works as well as it does is the scale of the materials involved; think friction and density.
You'd probably wind up with something like a full-scale erector set after you fool around with scaled-up (and incredibly heavy) metal LEGO bricks. To wit, there are already things like this out there, like "speed rail" and "aluminum extrusion" systems that are highly modular and require minimal tools to apply your every creative whim. They're also expensive as he
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Re:Bonus points if... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Bonus points if... (Score:5, Funny)
It'd be even more awesome if they had to assemble/disassemble the pieces in just the right way to gain access. And probably even more secure.
Additional Photo Of Vault and Facility... (Score:5, Funny)
It looks Impenetrable! [hoernersburg.net]
Re:Additional Photo Of Vault and Facility... (Score:5, Funny)
Not to mention highly confusing [artinthepicture.com] once inside and ringed by a darstadly innescapable staircase [umich.edu] that's been baffling would-be thieves for many a year.
And the asshole handled it without gloves??? (Score:5, Funny)
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I had a Lego Space Galaxy Explorer, but I didn't even know it until I saw the box in this picture, and I remembered building the damned thing. It looks easy now but I remember it being pretty hard, which is a testament to how long ago it really was... way cool. I bet I can finally get the missing satellite dish pieces to my lego moon set in there!
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I don't think it came shrinkwrapped. The cardboard flap opened so that buyers could see the parts.
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About to prove I'm one of the biggest geeks here, and that's saying something: AFAIK, Lego boxes have never been shrinkwrapped.
Storage (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Storage (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called compact shelving. Libraries have been using it for decades.
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I'd love to know how many people have been accidentally crushed in that kind of shelving. It's probably not zero.
Re:Storage (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.ideals.uiuc.edu/bitstream/2142/6564/1/librarytrendsv19i3j_opt.pdf [uiuc.edu]
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Had those in the stockroom, in the McJail where I did my servitude.
If you got assigned to clean the freezer, it was a miserable task: -18C in a thin uniform for at least an hour. But if you volunteered, saving someone you really hated from having to do it and giving them your stockroom detail instead, then it was bliss.
"Virtue is its own reward"? Hell no. It had more to do with the ten-litre bags of ketchup you'd burst by ramming the stockroom shelves together. :D
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And you didn't call OSHA, because??
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
That's a pretty standard layout for many archival places. Library stacks are nearly always like this - there's too many journals and books in most large libraries for open shelf access for all so the older stuff is graded by size and put into stacks. Often, you can approach nearly complete space usage with well designed shelves and identical volume sizes. Tours of the Bodleian library book stacks in Oxford are available to members of the University. They're really something to behold.
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High-density moveable shelving [google.com] is common in companies with lots of things to file. Check a hospital records office, for example.
IP (Score:3, Interesting)
When I first read it, I assumed it was going to be a data store of all possible combinations of every Lego block ever created so that all possible designs were prior art and their property.
Lego needs to work on this.
Re:IP (Score:5, Interesting)
My first year teacher at mathematics (Soren Eilers at University of Copenhagen) has put a lot of work into the counting problem of combining six two-by-four Lego blocks. It's a huge problem to figure out how many ways you can combine six of those, and he describes how he with mathematics and programming methods approaches this problem at http://www.math.ku.dk/~eilers/lego.html [math.ku.dk].
Lego themselves computed in 1974 that the ways you can combine those six blocks is 102,981,500 - and that number has been referenced ever since in different media - and it's wrong.
Now, if you want to compute the total number of possibilities, bear in mind what Soren Eilers writes on his site:
the mathematics of the total number of combinations is so irregular that it is very difficult to come up with a formula for it. Thus one has to essentially go through all the possibilities. Based on our data, we estimate the total number of ways to combine 25 two-by-four LEGO bricks to be a 47 digit number.
With the current efficiency of our computer programs we further estimate that it would take us something like
130,881,177,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
years to compute the correct number. After some 5,000,000,000 years we will have to move our computer out of the Solar system, as the Sun is expected to become a red giant at about that time.
Mod Parent Up (Score:2)
The space sets were the best (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh man, the Galaxy Explorer was the best! Seems like after the space sets, all the pieces started getting to specialized. Giant plates that could hardly be used to make anything other than what the instructions said.
I remember having dozens of little bins full of the hinge pieces, light bulb looking things, and space man helmets.
Good times.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yup, I dub that. Everytime that I take a look at Lego nowadays I can see tons of figures and stuff, but few pieces. Of course I changed that for my nephew when I bought a very big "Lego 25 years" box of standardized Lego. There were too few "plates" though. The grey plates were excellent to build on, both for technical Lego as well as for castles and the like.
But the galaxy explorer hit the spot, no need to take out the other sets. I went right back to the time that I and my brother were building cable cars
Re:The space sets were the best (Score:5, Funny)
Generally I'd construct the space sets upstairs and the castle sets downstairs. The space guys would come down and attack the castle sets. Somehow the knights always won by hurling large boulders in the way of the cruisers and attack ships. But most of the time it was due to the fact that I was never able to construct a Lego spaceship that was airworthy. IE, they never survived the flight down the stairs.
My mother and father had some significantly less than good nature curses when they found the shrapnel with bare feet. They would also ask me exactly why space people needed to attack the castle people. I never had a very good answer...
Re:The space sets were the best (Score:5, Funny)
Well from playing Civilization I learned that in fact its very possible for a phalanx to fight off a aircraft carrier and several tanks. I fail to see the problem with a knight killing an astronaut.
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Still have the galaxy explorer, and a bunch of other space and castle sets from when I was a kid. It's just that all of the sets are in a box. One box. Mixed together. Still have the instructions though, so in theory I still have the 'sets' (sorta).
Introduced my kids (6 & 9) to lego last year, and we play with my old ones all the time. I know, that makes me a substandard nerd, but what the hell. Lots of fun.
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Substandard nerd?
Let's put it that way, if I'll ever have kids, it's to stop people from looking funny at me when I play with my Legos...
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I wish they still made some of those space sets. In some cases you can't even buy some of the special pieces that came in those sets anymore.
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Yeah, gotta agree with you there. To the best of my recollection it was the pirate sets which started them off down the modern trend of specialized (and therefore nearly useless) pieces. Most of my sets as a kid were from the town collection, so while they had a few specialized pieces, they were mostly somewhat basic pieces that could be used to build a whole host of things.
God damnit (Score:5, Funny)
Re:God damnit (Score:5, Funny)
Now I can never play with Legos again without throwing up a little in my mouth. Thanks, sunami88.
Re:God damnit (Score:5, Funny)
Edible Legos "cuz we've got too many 3-year olds" (Score:2)
Sure you can. They even come in fruity flavors. [consumerist.com]
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Clearly, I'm not enough of a geek. All I did was get a little misty-eyed when they showed the Castle and Pirate sets. Those were my favorites.
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Legos (Score:5, Interesting)
I never followed any of the Lego instructions, though. So while I owned many of those sets, I never built any of those things.
Was there anybody else who would just dump open the packages, mix it in with all your other pieces, and build random crap...like flying boats that deploy ninjas?
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I would build the intended item in question and then start to modify it, mixing, adding and rearranging pieces until I was happy for a week or two.
Lego the ultimate toy for those with ADD. It is never done.
Re:Legos (Score:5, Funny)
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same here.. i liked jsut having the random blocks and building what i could.. my favorite was a sub i built.. it worked quite well
easier for objects than data? (Score:4, Insightful)
My favorite Lego kit.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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If you liked that one, try this one: http://guide.lugnet.com/set/8448 [lugnet.com]
V-6, 5-speed box (plus reverse), suspension... My favourite, definitely.
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Lego Colorado (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was a kid, LEGO decided to license out their manufacture to a Samsonite factory in Loveland, Colorado (right next door to the Hewlett Packard facility that was the first place HP had outsourced from its birth in Silicon Valley, as it happens.) The factory also made luggage and kids' bikes. It was cool because up until 2006 it still looked like it had been made of LEGO bricks: the windows were 2x4 clear bricks on-end, 12 feet high. They made all sorts of weird LEGO stuff, and I wonder sometimes if it was all official -- the injection molding dies came straight from Denmark, and were very, very carefully accounted for, but the plant also built other unusual LEGO sets like big crude-looking gears that only sort of meshed with the standard LEGO bricks.
My childhood was filled with disappointment because no matter how many LEGO kits I managed to get, some of my friends, whose parents worked at the plant, had trash-bags full of floor sweepings and could make playhouses we could crawl into with their bricks. (Including a lot of weird off-colors and bricks that weren't shaped quite right.) The local library had, and probably still has, several LEGO buildings the size of cars, beautifully designed and put together. I was upset that they were glued together, making all those parts worthless. Okay, I'm still upset by that.
Anyway. I've just always wondered if the rumors were true and the little Colorado plant did create some graymarket LEGO kits that Billund doesn't have. LEGO yanked their license after only a few years because they were doing a poor job, but maybe, just maybe, I have a couple LEGO pieces that aren't represented in that vault in Billund.
Not much of a secret (Score:2)
My first toy (Score:2)
The first toy I can remember was a small Lego police car set. I think it was comprised of a black "plane", two opaque, slanted pieces, two sets of wheels, and I believe it was labeled as police car because the pieces were black and white. I have never ever ever forgotten how much fun I had, and I can still see my parents now, giving it to me, in a little white box. I think I was maybe, maybe, 4 years old.
It's really nice to know that there is a place that has that exact set, and maybe, if I'm really lucky,
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe this one:
http://guide.lugnet.com/set/420_1 [lugnet.com] (US version)
Or less likely:
http://guide.lugnet.com/set/600_2 [lugnet.com] (also US version)
Buy here:
http://www.bricklink.com/search.asp?itemID=6270 [bricklink.com]
etc.
Thank you (Score:4, Interesting)
Mr Slacker, you have made me unbelievably happy. The first one was it, as soon as I saw it, I remembered the whole thing, standing there, being given this by my folks. For a split second, I was 4 years old and it was like the happiest moment of my life, again.
Thank you Thank you Thank you.
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OMG.. I had the same car :) .. mine was mostly red though. Once I tried to see if it'd float in water (in the bathtub) it didn't :)
This journalist is so emo (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember journalists! The first rule of journalism is "Nobody cares about you and your life. If you are really lucky, they might just be interested in your subject, but they certainly aren't interested in you!"
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Re:This journalist is so emo (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a journalist - a blogger (Score:2)
He's not a journalist, he's a blogger. For bloggers it is all about them.
That Big Yellow Castle (Score:2, Funny)
Building instructions from 1958 to 2007 (Score:5, Interesting)
Building instructions from 1958 to 2007 on this site:
http://www.hccamsterdam.nl/brickfactory/year/index.htm
My favorite part (Score:5, Funny)
Tearing Up. (Score:5, Insightful)
My dad died suddenly in early 1991. Those lego sets were the last thing he ever gave me.
Seeing that original box on the video made me feel 10 years old all over again. Thanks Gizmodo & Slashdot.
What's the story with the Yellow Castle? (Score:3, Interesting)
Lego-brand building blocks (Score:2, Interesting)
One of my friends wrote a fan letter to the company when he was very young, basically just a "I really love Legos, they're my favorite toy, I like building castles and spaceships!". Something like that.
The response he got was a brief reply along the lines of: "Please refer to our product as Lego-brand building blocks." I don't know the exact wording, but it was a rather terse trademark defense letter.
I understand you have to defend your trademark to keep it, but it's one of those sour feelings that he's r
Re:Lego-brand building blocks (Score:5, Informative)
Is this an American thing? Here in .uk I've never heard them referred to as 'Legos', only ever as 'Lego'. As if it's a continuum, like water, or cheese, rather than a set of discrete objects.
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from wikipedia:
I wonder if they have (Score:5, Funny)
one of those flat, gray, 1-by-2's from the little red ambulance. I'm missing one.
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There are a few sites out there that still have them. It will cost you probably about 50-80 bucks each. The BIG one probably 200 or more. http://www.bricklink.com/index.asp [bricklink.com]
But for free there is
http://www.ldraw.org/ [ldraw.org]
and
http://www.peeron.com/ [peeron.com]
I have been having so much fun with this these programs recreating virtual lego sets and I dont have to DIG through my massive box of em. Plus the programs are more cad like (and have more pieces) then the offical lego editor.
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Maybe you should link through coralcache then?
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Awesome.
Re:In Korea... (Score:5, Funny)
I'll have kids fairly soon that will be of an age to start playing with these things. I'll be encouraging the play of Lego more than watching TV or playing computer/console games. Sure, computer games can teach you problem solving techniques, but so does Lego, as well as having tactile response.