Between the earlier blog posts on BASIC programming, RobotWar and this article over at PC Advisor, I suppose I got nostalgic for my first home computer. The Texas Instruments 99/4A — what an awkward name that was.
At school, I had first experience a couple of different Apple ][+ computers (a Bell & Howell and a standard), and then Commodore Pet computers.
Initially, I didn’t have any storage device for the computer, so I had to key in programs as I needed them. Not long after the machine I got a cable that allowed a standard tape deck to work as a (manually controlled) storage unit. Eventually, I’d end up with sidecar expansions for: the speech synthesizer, 32KB memory, 5.25″ disk drives, and an Okidata printer.
There was a strict ANSI compliant BASIC included in ROM (TI BASIC) on the TI-99/4A, but it wasn’t too hard to work around most of the language differences. I remember keying in a text processing program from a magazine (pretty much a clone of roff), and saving my work to tape to print at school; only to find out that our school computers would read tapes made by my home computer. The most fundamental (to me at the time) missing functionality had to do with graphics. The TI came with neither sprites (included on the Commodore 64) or line drawing routines (on the Apple ][) built-in.
I eventually got the Extended BASIC cartridge which added sprites, much more powerful direct memory access routines (PEEK & POKE). The TI also became my gateway into assembly language as I used the Mini Memory Module Line-By-Line Assembler and eventually the Editor/Assembler to (attempt to) add line drawing facilities to the TI. That same project also taught me all about slope-intercept form.
Gaming on the TI-99/4A was a two-edged sword. One one hand there were a limited selection of nice games available (unlike the Apple or Commodore systems), and on the other that forced me into a lot more programming. There were a few really good games available for the TI, a couple stick out even to this day. Parsec was probably the most popular and best made title for the system with a really superb female synthesized voice. I also fondly remember a Star Trek cartridge, also Atarisoft ports of Defender and Pole Position. But it’s clear that I lusted after the large variety of games available on other systems. In the end I spent most of my time writing software. The last project for the TI was my attempt to port Konami Track & Field to the system (that time I learned a bunch about trigonometry). I even went so far as to build a 3-button controller specifically for the game.
That early experience with the TI-99/4A actually affected my computing experience for years to come. I’ve spent the majority of my time and energy working on alternative, “underdog” systems pretty much programming and porting software.
So what was your first home computer and did it impact your direction in life?
My first computer experiences where through printer/terminals to mainframe computers. A Multics system at Rome Labs that we got access to as members of the local Explorer Post; and a DEC-10 running TOPS-20 at Syracuse University. The common language on both was UCI Common LISP 2.0 – and LISP may have permanently warped my programming brain.
It was years before I had a personal computer; though others had TI-99/4A, Coleco Adam, Apple II, Atari 400, and Commodore 64 machines. I even dabbled extensively with a friend’s TI and another’s Commodore – but neither could afford even the tape drives… so all programs had to be keyed in each time we powered the machine on; and BASIC is pure crap compared to LISP – so I was frustrated in the extreme… One of the more interesting was a DEC Rainbow 100 that could boot either MS-DOS or CPM and had several programming languages. David, the friend with the DEC, even had a floppy drive! So I refused to buy my own computer long after I could afford one until one effectively simulated the mainframe time-sharing servers I was used to.
I contemplated one of the first 386 machines in 1986/1987… BYTE magazine built it up with so much hype… but the OS still sucked. I ended up buying myself an Amiga 500 after playing with a friend’s Amiga 1000 extensively and discovering the first personal computer with preemptive multi-tasking. The filesystem security sucked, and there was no concept of protected memory nor different users; but I could run multiple programs and effectively communicate between then with an RPC stack entirely written in C – and that was amazing at the time. Later the RPC calls got replaced with A-Rexx for inter-process communication (same language as Rexx on IBM mainframes). Games were plentiful for the Amiga, but TCP/IP networking and ethernet were very expensive; so it was years before I was able to do client/server coding over anything other than SLIP lines. I continued to use my Amiga (500 became a 3000 then a 3000T with ethernet card and 1/4″ tape backups) daily for nearly all tasks until Mac OS X was stable with 10.1. Then my PowerMac Cube (which I’d owned and not really touched for a year) suddenly became very useful with preemptive multitasking, MACH micro-kernal, BSD based OS and UNIX command line.
My first computer experiences where through printer/terminals to mainframe computers. A Multics system at Rome Labs that we got access to as members of the local Explorer Post; and a DEC-10 running TOPS-20 at Syracuse University. The common language on both was UCI Common LISP 2.0 – and LISP may have permanently warped my programming brain.
It was years before I had a personal computer; though others had TI-99/4A, Coleco Adam, Apple II, Atari 400, and Commodore 64 machines. I even dabbled extensively with a friend’s TI and another’s Commodore – but neither could afford even the tape drives… so all programs had to be keyed in each time we powered the machine on; and BASIC is pure crap compared to LISP – so I was frustrated in the extreme… One of the more interesting was a DEC Rainbow 100 that could boot either MS-DOS or CPM and had several programming languages. David, the friend with the DEC, even had a floppy drive! So I refused to buy my own computer long after I could afford one until one effectively simulated the mainframe time-sharing servers I was used to.
I contemplated one of the first 386 machines in 1986/1987… BYTE magazine built it up with so much hype… but the OS still sucked. I ended up buying myself an Amiga 500 after playing with a friend’s Amiga 1000 extensively and discovering the first personal computer with preemptive multi-tasking. The filesystem security sucked, and there was no concept of protected memory nor different users; but I could run multiple programs and effectively communicate between then with an RPC stack entirely written in C – and that was amazing at the time. Later the RPC calls got replaced with A-Rexx for inter-process communication (same language as Rexx on IBM mainframes). Games were plentiful for the Amiga, but TCP/IP networking and ethernet were very expensive; so it was years before I was able to do client/server coding over anything other than SLIP lines. I continued to use my Amiga (500 became a 3000 then a 3000T with ethernet card and 1/4″ tape backups) daily for nearly all tasks until Mac OS X was stable with 10.1. Then my PowerMac Cube (which I’d owned and not really touched for a year) suddenly became very useful with preemptive multitasking, MACH micro-kernal, BSD based OS and UNIX command line.
Yes, I used the TI-99/4A for programming mostly, too. It came with some lessons on how to use BASIC and that’s how I learned how to program.
The cool thing is that my parents bought it for my brother and I when my grandfather passed away. There was just enough money to buy the TI. From there, I learned programming and launched my career in it.
The best game I did (I was only like 14 years old then) was converting a board game called Mastermind to the TI. I think that was the one I programmed where it ran out of memory as I tried to run it. I didn’t have the expansion system. I had to strip down my code for it to even run. 5k of memory – wow, that’s nothing.
Yes, I used the TI-99/4A for programming mostly, too. It came with some lessons on how to use BASIC and that’s how I learned how to program.
The cool thing is that my parents bought it for my brother and I when my grandfather passed away. There was just enough money to buy the TI. From there, I learned programming and launched my career in it.
The best game I did (I was only like 14 years old then) was converting a board game called Mastermind to the TI. I think that was the one I programmed where it ran out of memory as I tried to run it. I didn’t have the expansion system. I had to strip down my code for it to even run. 5k of memory – wow, that’s nothing.