[Andy A.]

I started in 2001. At the time I think Small Parts inc. was still the 'prefered' supplier. It's a little foggy, but I think you could buy from other suppliers as long as something equivalent was in SPI. Naturally, at the time, our corner of the woods didn't have anything like a Home Depot nearby. I think we had just gotten a Walmart. It was pretty rough.

Robots were a great deal more reliant on the KOP, but there was also a lot of interesting things in there that don't show up anymore. All your motors came in the kit, and lot of them had associated gearboxes and power transmission parts. Getting spares for KOP items was tough and teams traded a great deal (not using your FP motors? We'll trade you our window motors for them...). A big part of success was figuring out how to utilize the KOP and SPI catalog to maximum effect.

I've rewatched match videos from the early 2000s recently and I'll agree with JVN. Robots were slower, clumsy and the games ended up being dominated by some game breaking strategy. In 2002 95 had a 8fps robot and that was fast (two wheel drive with corner skids!). A 15+fps robot back then would have been thought impossible (and, with 30 amp breakers and a 60 amp main it'd have been challenging at best).

There were also lot of scissor lifts. Like, a lot of them. I have no idea why.