Speak & Spell

This educational toy looked like a computer for kids with a colourful plastic keyboard and a dinky fluorescent display above it. It was designed to let you play a range of simple spelling games, the main one being the spelling challenge - it spoke a word and you typed out the correct spelling.

Sometimes the challenge with Speak & Spell wasn't spelling the word correctly, but understanding what the hell the word was. You would be asked to spell "Enza" and after pressing the 'repeat word' button a dozen times and straining really hard to listen very carefully you'd eventually work out that you were actually being asked to spell "answer".

Speak & Guess & Spell may have been a more apt name for the machine.