Retro Tech Tuesday: Verbot

Last month, I mentioned my near-purchase of a Sony Aibo. While that was a case of close-but-no cigar, there was one robot I was lucky enough to have as a kid: Verbot. Tomy's Verbot offered a revolutionary robot that could be programmed to respond to basic voice commands, like "Forward" and "lift up." It was a thing of beauty, at least in theory. In practice, it took several attempts to get the dang thing to do anything, and its ability to lift things was always a bit iffy at best. That's not quite how it was portrayed in the commercial: