Ah, the TI-99/4A. My first computer. What a mercurial beast of thing that was. I desperately wanted a C64 for Xmas but my Dad was somehow convinced to buy one of these. It had about 4 games (including “Hunt the Wumpus”) and so instead of playing the myriad C64 games that all my mates were playing, I was forced to learn BASIC and try to write my own! 45 years later, I’m still programming.
My earliest memory of anything computer programming is from the early 80s, when a snow day had the two neighbor kids, whose parents were teachers in another district, over to our house with their TI-99/4a. The oldest showed me the entry and running of the sample program Mr. Bojangles. I was enthralled.
A few years later I had one of my own, though at that point it was very long in the tooth. But I still learned its limits, playing (yes) Hunt the Wumpus, Tombstone City, and others, programming, and doing things like composing the Jeopardy! theme song in BASIC.
I have one of these again, with the stuff I had as a kid, and more (like the voice synth) and it's so limited even for the era, but still iconic.
The TI-99/4A was the first computer around here that was affordable (wanted the Apple II but that was priced way out of my league). I never got any cartridges, used the family TV as a monitor (so no evening computing) and for the first month or so had no tape deck (so programming on paper and retying at every session).
The included manual for programming BASIC was extremely well written, and it's sprites made it very easy to write your own games. I remember starting with a multi-player 'snakes' variant, a 'defender' clone, an unfinished chess game (ran out of memory), and top down microcar racing game.
I also remember longing for the UCSD/Pascal cartridge as all (library) books I read used Pascal in their coding examples, but it was too expensive.
I later switched to the ZX Spectrum for which I had HiSoft Pascal, and a burnt in bare black&white monitor sold for scrap from an old arcade game.
> used the family TV as a monitor (so no evening computing)
I was allowed to program during ad breaks, typing in code I wrote out while the family was watching a show. :)
I too remember the manual as being very well written. As I recall, it had tables on the back with frequencies for different notes, and foreground/background colors which went well (and not well) together.
Just kidding... That sounds like my journey as well. I had friends in the neighborhood who also had the TI-99/4a. We all had Cub Scouts and Boy's Life magazine listings to key in.
Did you have the data cassette recorder? We used to try to "load programs" from Michael Jackson's Thriller album.
This was my first computer too! I loved it - that’s where I learned LOGO. In my home country, games (and basically everything) were incredibly expensive, but my father still bought it from a friend who was selling it to upgrade to a C64.
I remember playing Parsec, and Space Invaders. I am sure I had 2 or 4 more games. But don't remember which ones.
My Dad was convinced by the marketing that its 16-bit CPU was the wave of the future, unlike those old-fashioned 8-bit CPUs.
It had a smidge more than 4 games. I broke several joysticks playing TI Invaders, and my favorite was Parsec, which was also one of the games which supported the optional speech synthesizer. I also had Tunnels of Doom, Car Wars, and Tombstone City, and remember playing Alpiner.
That's 6 games right there, ... or in other words, a drop in the bucket compared to my friend's Apple ][. Alas. And he could use a floppy disk, while I only had cassette tape or cartridges.
One of my game cartridges was Extended Basic. That probably got the most use.
I distinctly remember my dad too choosing for the TI-99/4A over the competition because of the 16-bit CPU. Little did he, let alone the little boy that I was at the time, know of the limitations of its weird design.
>My Dad was convinced by the marketing that its 16-bit CPU was the wave of the future,
I think my mom was convinced because of bargain bin prices after it was more or less dead as a platform. But I'm not sure, she's not around to ask anymore... I've read though that after TI gave up on it, some department stores were dumping them for well under $100, and sometimes closer to $50.
I think I only once, ever, got it to load a saved program from cassette. I don't know if I was just a moron as a kid, or if they were actually that horrible for storage.
