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Hearing the opening music over the tape loading sounds reminded me of this track, involving Pirate Adventure for the TI-99/4A.

The TI also had its adequate share of non game titles (a ton of educational stuff, plus access to the PLATO system), Multiplan, TI Writer, etc). Granted, for "important" work, an expansion system with a disk drive and printer (which were priced at unobtanium levels) were required, but still, the TI was not all games, and it could have been a viable competitor at the time if not for asshat decisions made by the folk at Texas Instruments.

So for ten times the cost (ouch) I could get 250,000 times the RAM, 1,000 times faster clock speed, and at least 10,000,000 times the storage.

Yeah, there's no arguing that's a steep price jump, but based on your calculations it seems like prety good value.

I hope my games still run: Parsec, Congo Bongo, and my favorite Alpiner.

This should help

Good luck! Maybe we'll see you on the interweb one of these days.

This reminds me of another company that made technically superior products that were so quirky, hard to use, weird-looking and goofy corporate that almost no one bought them even though the engineering was profound. Microsoft is the new Texas Instruments.

Copy/Paste between applications worked in Windows. Nobody in their right mind used Windows 3.x with the 640 mentioned by the parent poster - typical was 2 MB or more.

Thus, I infer the use of MS-DOS 5.0 or 6.0. And good luck, copy/paste.

My first PC wished it had the power of the 8086 microprocessor, with 16 Kb of RAM. I learned on MS-DOS 3.2, and I remember when the MS-DOS sub-directory (DOS 2.x) was a big deal. And I have a fully working, complete copy of MS Windows 1.0 on 5.25" 360k floppies. (Yes, the ORIGINAL release, not the 1.0A)

Come back when the bad memory you speak of has relapsed.

This was the design of the TI-99/4A peripheral expansion box. You can see some photos here (look at the second row). The concept was neat in theory, but in practice it was a flop. The box would accept interchangable standard-sized expansion cards. Typical expansion cards were an RS-232 interface, 32k memory expansion, and a floppy disk controller. Each card was housed in its own metal casing, and all cards had the same form factor. However, the cards were bulkier and more expensive than anything comparable at that time. I think the cost of expanding the TI-99/4A was one of the reasons the computer failed in the market.

I used the AppleII at the junior high and high school... 1982 it would have been (I would guess I was 15 or 16 at the time)... MY first computer would have been the TI-99/4A with all the trimmings... sprite pack, extra memory, external console, tape drive (woooot)... i remember writing what i thought was the best game in the world at the time and it was just a 'snake' type game where you issued up/left/right/down key commands and a trail of blocks would be drawn on the screen and two people could play... i remember that was when the idea of an array came into play and clarity in my head... i had to have a way to quickly sub through the x/y from a given 'snake' to figure if the 2nd player had touched the other one and also added an option to have the tail 'disappear' after 20 moves so it appeared to 'slither' or move.. oh, man... those were the days... http://www.99er.net/ti.shtml

My first owned computer ever was a Texas Instrument 99/4a (TI99/4A). My parents bought it for me to improve my communication skills and for education when I was a kid (7? years old). I was actually scared at it first. I was only interested in gaming (e.g., Atari 2600). Then, I found out games on it like TI Invaders, Alpiner, Tomb City, The Amazing Maze, etc.) ;)

John Cleese to do this video? I know the answer, money, but this is definitley strange. When was the last time you saw a celebrity like this involved in promoting some obscure IT product?

Tom Baker... Lalla Ward.... PR1ME computer commercials. Before that I remember Bill Cosby on TV speaking for the TI-99/4a.

And I don't pay that much attention. I'm sure it's more common than you think though these days it's far more common for celebrities to do voice overs than appearances.

According to this page, the VIC-20 started at $299 and in stages cut the price to $99 in a vicious price war with the TI-99/4A, which eventually saw TI selling for less than manufacturing cost.

Right up your alley...

Viva la TI-99/4a!!??

Check out the TI-99/4a here:
www.99er.net

TI-99/4A?

I'm sick of being unemployed, but I'm glad I don't have to work for a company whose high-profile CEO publicly makes these kinds of unwarranted assumptions. Nowhere in the article does Ballmer clearly identify how software prices have any relationship to hardware prices.

But lower prices have become part of Microsoft's strategy for gaining market share in developing nations. In recent months, the software maker has announced plans to introduce low-cost "starter editions" of Windows XP into countries including India, Russia and Thailand. These versions will be bundled only with entry-level PCs and will not be available for retail sale.

That's the closest he seems to come to linking the issues of software costs -- in this case, the cost of the OS -- to hardware costs. In the linked article, the software is described as being available only in Hindi. Even more significantly, says that linked article, ... The ability to do home networking and to create multiple user accounts on a single PC has been removed, while display resolution is capped at a maximum of 800 by 600 pixels. More important, users can run only three programs or have three windows opened at once, a limitation that research company Gartner believes could frustrate users and drive them to buy bootleg copies of Windows XP instead.

So, is the cost of an OS really the problem? Well, you can get by with OpenOffice software instead of Windows, find open-source chat and email programs, and compute away.

By the way...concerning everybody's favorite free (as in beer) software, the article says

The Microsoft CEO bristled at the suggestion that Linux is gaining in popularity as a client operating system at the expense of Windows. "There's no appreciable amount of Linux on client systems anywhere in the world," he said.

Verification of this assertion is left as an exercise for the reader.

Back when home PCs were an expensive novelty, my dad, who then worked at Texas Instruments, thought that the TI 99/4A ought to be given away for free with every purchase of an arbitrary suite of software -- this was before we all started using them for spreadsheets and word processing, and long before the Internet became commonplace. I wonder if Ballmer would dare to try to give away hardware pre-loaded with Micrsoft OSes and apps, charging people only for the software. If he did, I predict that given rampant piracy and the Open Software initiative, his attempt would flop.

Check www.99er.net for updates on this rockin machine.

Check www.99er.net for updates on this rockin machine.

Texas Instrument 99/4A was my first computer. My father bought one so I could learn to use a computer except I learned to use it for games. I was into Atari 2600 games and arcades (e.g., Pac-Man).

Recently, I finally got TI99/4A to work in MESS emulator. The instructions can be found here in case anyone is interested. Some of those games still rule! :)

You can see my computer and console history here.

Texas Instrument 99/4A was my first computer. My father bought one so I could learn to use a computer except I learned to use it for games. I was into Atari 2600 games and arcades (e.g., Pac-Man).

Recently, I finally got TI99/4A to work in MESS emulator. The instructions can be found here in case anyone is interested. Some of those games still rule! :)

I was sure to find references to my goold old Timex Sinclair 1000, or even my Adam computer, but no! I had to read about Compaq...

Not even a word on the TI 99/4A. Guess I'll have to publish my own list. Actually, I had planned a long time to do a timeline of my computers, see how it respected moore's law. Guess there's no better time then right now to get started.

quite odd, they've developed it for everything from the vic-20 to the Nintendo, to the Co-co, wonder why they don't have it for the TIc? Oh, that's right.. It must be because the TI-99/4a has a 16 bit processor, and it's only for 8 bit systems.. (yes folks, the TI was the first 16 bit 'Home Computer' but due to bad coding, Bad marketing, (sorry Bill Cosby) and the fear of loss of money, it never went far with TI, but just check out the following, (including a 32 bit upgrade path) Myarc9640

The TI-99/4A actually had quite a bit of a following - there's a whole Yahoo group that is relatively active here it is. There's also tons of other information on the web ...
99er.net
Some guy's TI web site

FWIW, I clearly remember an italian version called "Grillo Parlante" (Talking Cricket).

According to what's here, there were also a French and a German version.

TI-99/4A! :) I had a 5.25" single-sided single-density floppy disk drive, with a whopping 90k per diskette. The average application was about 20k, word processor, Editor/Assembler development package, etc. Sticking in another diskette was like adding a new hard disk drive to your machine today! :)

Then some nut in the TI User's Group realized that we could stick two of the new half-height double-sided drives then becoming popular in PC/XTs into the disk drive bay. 180k per drive, two drives at once! (TI Disk Controller cards wouldn't run double-density, so we didn't get the full 360k/disk.) Literally, you could go weeks or months using nothing but the two diskettes in the two drives.

I kinda miss that. But, then again, that was before the good porn came in large, high-resolution 1+ megabyte JPGs. (16 colors was enough back then, too...)

The TI home computer you speak of (TI-994a, specifically) used cartridges for programs and games. One such program was "TI LOGO", which is mentioned in the Business 2.0 article.

LOGO came with a huge instructions binder- it was fun to try out- more powerful (and more complicated) than BASIC. And of course, you could save things to your 5 1/4" double density floppy w/ the holepunch in it....

related link- 99er.net

IIRC Portland Oregon is the home to the only active TI user group around. And yes, they have a great website for all your 99er needs.

Python would be a good choice as it is geared towards teaching. Java and C/C++ might as well, though there are pros and cons to each. C has the advantage that the correlation between C and assembly is reasonably close and therefore understandable (unless you have optimizations turned on :-).

1. self-taught BASIC programming on TRS-80, Commodore PET, and Apple ][+
2. self-taught 6502 assembly on Apple ][+
3. some Pascal at a computer camp (yeah, a geek at an early age)
4. the teacher's course for AP Computer Science (including Karel the robot, and more Pascal)
5. BASIC programming course in high school on TI-99/4 computers. I already knew more than the instructor, so I helped teach the course and learned more assembly language instead.
6. CS major at UC Berkeley
   • CS-50, the "weeder" course (Pascal)
   • machine language and low level hardware
   • data structures and algorithms
   • operating systems (Panda, and Unix with C)
   • compilers and programming languages
   • computer graphics
   • computer hardware (plus a lab)
   • computer theory
   • graph theory and combinatorics
   • introductory EE lab

an engineering co-op

full time work for 13 years or so, including self-taught C++ and lots of other things... I guess my points are that (a) there isn't a single "right" answer (b) some OOP is OK, but needs to be balanced with some understanding of the underlying systems (i.e., I agree with you), and (c) that all needs to be balanced with some fun!

Check out http://www.99er.net for the motherlode of TI-99 info.

Cool! What CPU did it use, for the uninformed?

The TI-99/4A ran on a 16 bit TMS-9900 CPU running at a speedy 3MHz.
For more info, check out the TI-99/4A Home Computer Page

--
Jonathan Hunt