Quote:
Originally Posted by Jake177
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Ohhh we should bring back the FIRST 101's!!
Some of my favorites...
In 1996 the Human players actually had to SIT on the floor, with seatbelts that strapped them into the floor!
The old days of Rumble at the Rock were amazing. This very first FIRST offseason event was held in Plymouth MA, by the recently renewed team 23! Many teams camped at this event to save money, and in 1996, there was a giant hurricane (I think it was Bertha) that made it absolutely crazy for any team that was carrying their robot in the back of a pickup truck!! (we may have raced into the venue 5 minutes before it started frantically wiping the robot off with towels because the tarp wasnt strong enough for the hurricane!)
The 1999 Game Objects might easily have been the best sleeping objects in the history of FIRST - Floppies were an almost silk material packed with styrofoam peanuts and lined with looped velcro.
I don't know the starting or end years, but I know at least 96-99 teams were allowed to have two drive coaches. This was one of my favorite parts of the drive team, as you could get past that whole student vs mentor coach debate and just have one of each!
Again my memory is fuzzy on the years, but it might have been 1997 where FIRST allowed the dimensions to expand to 36"x36"... which horribly didnt allow robots to fit through standard doorframes!! Too many teams learned this the hard way!
1996 competition (and maybe a few years prior?) were held on a stage inside Epcot. Several mascots overheated, and some were mistaken for disney characters and ended up having to give autographs!! 1997 was the first year of Tent City outside of Epcot.
For many years, the robots didn't have the Master Breaker switches we now know so well... we actually had giant fuses that were used to protect the robot components from damage.
We used to program in PBasic... no fancy C or Labview or Java... PBASIC... try implementing a random number generator in that!!
(BTW, there was a girl from the Thunderchickens doing research at champs on the "way back when" stories.. anyone know who she is and if she finished her project?? I'd love to see it!)