The Rubik’s cube was a simple puzzle, where a 3 X 3 cube with six colours had to be twisted and lined up so you only had one colour per face of the cube. The cube (and you should be ashamed if you haven’t seen one before!) looks like this:

It was actually invented in 1974 by Erno Rubik, and In September 1979, a deal was signed with Ideal Toys to bring the Magic Cube to the Western world. The puzzle made its international debut at the toy fairs of London, Paris, Nuremberg and New York in January and February 1980 – hence the entry here in onlythe80s.

The challenge was always how fast you could solve the puzzle. I was hopeless, and found it was easier at first to actually pull it apart and line up all the coloured cubes in their correct positions. But for the record, The current world records for both average and single times were set by Edouard Chambon. He set an average of 11.48 seconds and a best time of 9.18 on February 23, this year.

There are plenty of sites on the net that systematically show you how how to solve the cube. None better than here.