Password Journal
A plastic diary that opened only for its owner's recorded voice, complete with an invisible-ink pen, a little light to read it by, and an intruder alert you recorded yourself. Girl Tech built it, Radica and then Mattel kept selling it through the 2000s and beyond, and every little brother in America practiced his sister's voice.
Janese Swanson had been a Brøderbund product manager on The Playroom and the Macintosh version of Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? before she left in 1992 to work on voice gadgets, licensing the Yak Bak to Yes! Entertainment and the Talkboy F/X+ to Tiger. In 1995 — two years before finishing a doctorate on gender and play — she founded Girl Tech near her home in San Rafael, California, to make electronic toys specifically for girls. Buyers didn't get it: "For two years after I founded the company, toy store buyers would say, 'Can you make it pink?' 'Can't you make it for boys?' And I would say, 'No, this is what girls like to play with.'"
Girl Tech's gadgets mostly guarded something — the Snoop Stopper, a keepsake box with a remote-controlled lock; a talking Friend Frame; a Bug 'Em listening device — and the company also published books like Tech Girl's Internet Adventures and wrote a technology curriculum for Girl Scout councils. Swanson sold the business to Radica Games, the Hong Kong company behind Bass Fishin', for $6 million, and by October 1999 Girl Tech's own website was listing the Password Journal alongside Door Pass, Friend Frame and Beam It.
The pitch was simple. You recorded a password in your own voice; the journal opened when it heard you say it and stayed shut for anyone else, with an intruder alert — also in your voice — for whoever tried. Inside were a notebook, an invisible-ink pen, a light that revealed the writing, and a small compartment behind the pages. A 2006 Radica instruction sheet still lists the essentials: record your password, say it to open, an intruder alarm, a glow light. The finicky voice check that turned away its own owner on a bad day is the part everyone remembers.
Mattel completed its purchase of Radica in 2006, and the Password Journal kept selling under the Girl Tech name in new colors and numbered versions; Mattel's own product records list the last of them, Password Journal 8, as released in 2013 and discontinued in 2014. Swanson went on to teach art in a San Diego-area school district.
Similar items
Yak Bak
The palm-sized recorder built for exactly one purpose: capturing a burp, a catchphrase, or a dumb sound and replaying it until the batteries gave out. Two buttons—Say and Play—and about six seconds of glorious nonsense.
Talkboy
The handheld cassette recorder that Kevin McCallister made famous in Home Alone 2—a toy Tiger Electronics built for the movie before kids could buy it. Tape your voice, rewind it, slow it down: every kid who owned one immediately did the voice trick from the movie, and that simple gimmick was the entire appeal. Tiger Electronics' most beloved and oddly random toy, it came perilously close to being just a footnote in cinema history.
Dream Phone
The pink electronic board game where you called cute boys on a plastic phone to figure out which one had a crush on you. A deduction game wrapped in early-'90s sleepover fantasy, complete with a chunky toy telephone and recorded voices.
20Q
A palm-sized handheld electronic guessing game by Radica where you think of an object and the toy reads your mind through yes/no questions. Released around 2003–2004 and a holiday best-seller by 2005, it used AI to eerily predict what you were thinking.