Lego bricks and Subutteo squads disappeared up the snout of the Hoover and Action Men eventually laid down their arms, legs and every other expensively articulated appendage, but Fisher Price toys seemed to go on forever, as will be readily confirmed by any parent who has listen to Edelweiss being played for the 10,000th time on a plastic gramophone.

But though Fisher Price has cornered the market in saxophones that blow bubbles and Chattering Chimps, it isn’t a name you’d immediately associate with computers. Not unless they were on wheels and played Zip-ah-dee-do-dah when whacked with a plastic hammer.

But the company has had to bow to the inevitable and has joined the race to fill this year’s Christmas stockings with CD-Roms. It has launched a series of multimedia packages (for Windows) aimed at the three-to-five age group. It features a menagerie of zany wildlife, lively animation, digitised speech, sound effects and music. Homes (but not mine, I’m relieved to say) are going to rock merrily to the sounds of the Jungle Bebop, the Word Do-Wop, and the Barnyard Rhythm ‘n’ Moos as tiny tots are lured into learning the basics while they think they’re only having some innocent fun.

I tried out the first in the series, A-B-Cs (Pounds 34.95) and loved it. I’d like to tell you more but, eager for an expert opinion, I loaned the disc to a five-year-old. And she lost it. She swears it’s somewhere in her bedroom and has had her embarrassed family playing a frenetic permutation of hunt the thimble. But to no avail. It will probably come to light, they tell me, when she gets round to mucking out her My Little Pony stable. She’s suitably contrite, suspecting (quite rightly) that she’s blown her chances of launching into a lucrative career as an assistant software reviewer for The TES. But, I must say I’m rather heartened by her carelessness, displaying as it does a healthy and commendable disrespect for the new technology.

I can remember that it wasn’t so long ago that I was shown a CD-Rom for the first time. I held it in my hands as if it were at least as sacred as the Holy Grail. I was awed by those mind-boggling statistics about how much information could be crammed on so flimsy a disc. I tried to recount the experience to non-computing friends. I may as well have told them I’d seen a flying saucer - they thought I was making the whole thing up. And now, just a few years later, kids or, at least, those who have a PC at home, treat CD-Roms just as casually as they would any other toy.

It’s a pity their parents can’t be as level-headed. But they are bludgeoned by the hype merchants into believing that a PC is as important in successful child rearing as a potty and fish fingers. From the moment they can clutch a mouse, today’s kids are being nagged remorselessly by soft-spoken software into devoting their precious play time to yet another spelling bee or sum.

They’ll find no respite in nursery where staff will feel obliged to use IT to cram the poor mites for their “performance indicator” tests. By the time they graduate to reception class they won’t want to have anything more to do with computers. To keep them occupied, teachers will have to provide Chattering Chimps, bubble-blowing saxophones and non-stop Edelweiss.

The Fisher Price software, Pounds 34.95 each, Ablac, South Devon House, Newton Abbot, Devon TQ12 2BP