[Chris Hibner]

I remembered a few more interesting changes through the years:

-In 1997 it was legal to intentionally detach parts of the robot during the match. Many teams took advantage of this, including the National Champion Team Hammond - the Beatty Beast. They placed a bunch of inner tubes (the scoring object in the 1997 game) on a device and they would then lock that device on the top of the "tree", thereby locking those tubes in place ensuring that they would score.

-Prior to 2004, BASIC was the language used to program the robots. It was very limited and made you have to think up creative ways to do some simple math.

- Remember the 7.2V backup battery on the IFI control system? That was a result of the ultra-rugged 2002 game. Many teams experienced electrical current transients so large that the main batter voltage would drop below the stay-alive voltage of the microcontroller causing a control system "brown out", temporarily disabling the robot. IFI implemented the backup battery the following year to prevent this issue.

Wow, it's really fun remembering all of this stuff. I never get tired of thinking of games gone by.