When I was 10 or 11, my favourite Christmas present was a Gakken 150 IC-in-1 Home Electronics Kit (model no. 81357).

This Japanese-made toy (marketed via Tandy and RadioShack) gave me a solid education in the fundamentals of electronics: circuits, components, DC and PV power (it had a solar battery), photo-resistance (it had a cadmium sulphide light-sensitive receiver switch), short-range radio transmission and reception. It also had an integrated circuit board, as well as a range of resistors, capacitors, rheostats, relays, tuners, and transformers.

There was even an experiment for making electronic percussion – this involved wrapping some wires around my wrists, and connecting other wires to some pieces of aluminium kitchen foil. By tapping my hands on the foil (and completing the circuit), the resulting sound was like electronic bongos, and not a million miles from the electric drum pads Kraftwerk played during their appearance on BBC TV’s “Tomorrow’s World” in 1975.

This dabbling later led me to dismantling an old television, and repurposing some of the components to make a very rudimentary synthesiser (with bits of tin can for the keyboard) for a school science project.

More importantly, playing with this kit drove my curiosity as to how things work, learning to take them apart and repair them, and triggered an equal frustration with sealed-unit devices and labels saying “no user serviceable parts” inside.

Next week #6: Microfiche