Here are some more blasts from the past...

- Robots made of plywood

- The infamous "2 on 1" strategy

- Two fields per stage/regional, with only one in use at a time

- Trying to calculate your seeding on Friday night (FIRST did nout publish seedings until Saturday morning)

- Playing matches every 10 minutes or so once you'd been relegated to the losers side of the bracket

- Teams outside of the top 8 being allowed to decline an alliance offer

- Pre-arranged alliances

- Two team alliances

- Calling timeouts

Wow, it has been a long time.

There are still a few of those around, just not in our shop. If we can bend 30x30 extrusion , how and why should we use wood?

Haha
 

The worst thing was when you spent a good 3 or 4 hours on friday night trying to calculate what the bracket was going to be for the next day. Then when you arrived at the competition, you found out that you were off by one seed...and your WHOLE bracket was trash!!! Ahhhh the good ol' days!

I resent that remark our robot had a piece of wood in it. It sure beat the plexiglass that we were going to use and it never broke.

Wow Andy... way to bring back the good ol' days :)

I loved the placebos... the placeb-o-matic especially :P

Anyone at Rumble the first year remember their placebo??? Points to anyone who remembers that :P

God I miss those days... the game was so great back then.. in '96 not only were the human players strapped in, but the driver's weren't behind plexiglass and they had TV screens at their stations to watch the videos.

Oh yeah, and you got the points you got.. not 2x the losers and all that jazz.

Thanks for the nostalgic moment :)

Speaking of Placebo's...
 

How about these...

Do you remember...

...Showbot!!!

...The robot crossing signs

...Talking trashcans

dont forget:

Andy the Astronaut!

[BTW - im trying hard to FORGET OffKilter: EEEEEEEeeeeeEEeeee EEEE EeEEeeeeEE eeeeEEe EeEEEEeeEeeeeEEEEEEEEEGh - nobody ever has a spear when you really need one (to poke your eardrums out!) ]

i remember alot of that stuff....

bringing it back to the old school FIRST days...
gotta love those floppies and inner tubes :)





edit: didn't realize i was posting under my brothers name...lol, really though, this is Team238-Aholic

-98 awards ceremony where off kilter got booed for playing during the winning animation

Re: Haha
 

Andy, I remember that feeling oh so well. '98 was my first year in FIRST, so I was still ridiculously eager. Friday night of Nationals (It was still called nationals back then, even though I was on the one and only Canadian team) I stayed up until 3am entering all the scores into an excel spreadsheet. Finally I got it all done, only to find out Saturday morning that about 3/4 of it was wrong. Despite my many errors, I still managed to correctly determine our first three opponents of the day. Was it worth it, probably not, but I'll never forget the arduous effort.

I've got a picture of one these somewhere in a photo drawer. I'll try and get it scanned.

Re: Speaking of Placebo's...
 

I actually still have a robot crossing sign...i remember i got the last one in 99, and there were people all over epcot trying to buy it off me...it got all the way up to 50 bucks, but i held on!

Re: RetroFIRST...
 

now someone has to fill me in on that one

Big Mike,

The dead tie in 1997 was probably one of the most amazing yet most boring matches of FIRST history. The RoboRaiders (team 75 in this age) went up against I believe TJ² in the finals. Now that year the idea was to get as many innertubes on the top of the goal as possible (at least that was the best way to score). The RoboRaiders had made a strategy out of going right after the other teams robot and not letting them near the human player throughout the whole playoffs. (The human player in that year was the best way to get 3 tubes if you wanted to get to the top first with a cap). Well, in the finals, both robots decided to do the same thing to each other, basically resulting in a long pushing match on the side of the field between the two teams. In the process, absolutely no tubes were touched on the field, and no tubes were thrown from the human player station. (The first tie breaker was the number of tubes in the human player station). When the two minutes were up, there was nothing moved on the field, no tubes scored, no tubes tossed. FIRST went town the whole list of tiebreakers and found that they tied in each and every category! Because of this, they had to repeat the round...which the RoboRaiders eventually won.

It was interesting to say the least.

One of the things I miss most from my high school days was breakfast at Liberty Inn before the day began.

Re: placebos
 

The hover craft was really neat! Do they still have it in storage?

As student driver, having a match against the vacuum cleaner in '97 MotoMidwest...with Eric (FIRST) as the driver.

"Hey, Eric, ... you're going down"

"Oh, yeah? I'm gonna 'clean' up this round."

We actually scored FOR the placebo that match trying to see if the scoring system would put them in 2nd place and our other opponent in 3rd. I think the placebo automatically got 0 pts and 3rd though, but we tried........It would have been interesting to say the least.

KA-108 :cool:

p.s. Andy, I got a 12. Yikes!