Confession: I bought three TI99/4A's
spell.mywire.org:1960/~stack/0256.gmi
Any TI99/4A fans out there?
Jan 09 · 4 months ago · 👍 norayr
10 Comments ↓
I have a Ti89 from 20+ years ago
🚀 stack [OP] · Jan 09 at 23:49:
Hey, that's a calculator! I was excited for a minute that there was a predecessor, but 20+ years don't make sense as TI99/4A is from 1981.
There was a TI99/4A in one of my classrooms in high school. I remember the teacher asking another kid for help with it and the kid said, "You should ask Brad. He knows more about computers". The teacher refused. I never would have remembered the guy if not for that so...yeah.
lol, I didn't know the TI99 was a computer. Until today my brain sees "TI-xx" and thinks calculator
🚀 stack [OP] · Jan 10 at 01:36:
Yeah it was a 16-bit computer they introduced in 1979. The CPU was more like a mini -- no registers but you can set a part of RAM to be registers. You can change that on a per-user basis creating a multi-user system. But it only had 256 bytes of 16-bit RAM, the rest (16K?) was 8-bit ram addressed via the graphics chip, making it kind of slow for no good reason.
It also supported a daisy-chained expansion bus where you could plug in many peripherals (some people built chains several feet long) -- or a giant peripheral expansion cage that needed two people to lift.
👻 darkghost · Jan 10 at 02:40:
The predecessor was the TI 99/4 which was taken off the market for the RF modulator emitting too much RFI. The 4a is much improved. There was a TI 99/2 which is a low cost low spec BASIC machine intended to complete with the Timex Sinclair, but it came out after. Also later is the portable CC40 which bears some resemblance to the much more common Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 but worse.
I'll add I really wanted one of these based on what I saw. I ended up with a Tandy Color Computer (better CPU but worse graphics and sound). It did change my life though.
👻 darkghost · Jan 11 at 11:32:
I wound up with an Atari 65XE. Being a snot nosed kid, I played games on it. My uncle had the TI 99/4a and I did practice what little BASIC I knew on it. I don't recall using any of the storage options so it never got too involved.
🚀 stack [OP] · Jan 11 at 17:50:
@darkghost: I worked all summer to save up for an Atari 400, bought from Hassids in Brooklyn. After 20 minutes or so something inside got hot and created a lot of screen noise. They would only exchange it if I paid a bit more for an 800, which was well worth it for the keyboard.
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