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Comment by ddrager | Hacker News Reader

Oh wow, the TI-99/4A, I learned BASIC on this computer! If you didn't have the tape storage unit, which could save data onto an audio cassette, you had to re-type your program into the computer if the power went out or unit was reset.

It also had an external voice processor as an addon which was really creepy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUPkCNcT1Yw

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It was my family's first computer and the one I wrote my first programs on. Three things that stuck in my craw about it were:

1. BASIC supported PEEK but there was no POKE.

2. You could save files to a disk but you had to remember the file names because there was no way to list them.

3. Lower case letters were just small versions of uppercase.

For the last one, a year or so ago I actually found a dump of the Apple IIe font and hacked an emulated TI-99 to use it, and it worked and looked great, so I have no idea what they were thinking.

Anyway, it's awesome to see them be able to squeeze so much out of it in this demo.

If you plugged in the Mini Memory cartridge, it added a POKE command to TI BASIC.

There was a common cartridge, "Disk Manager 2", which gave you common DOS-like disk management utilities.

The lowercase font really was absurd. A few programs redefined them with much more pleasant fonts. The "Adventure" module for running the Scott Adams text adventures comes to mind.

The Editor/Assembler program gave you a better font as well as 40 colummns instead of the normal 32.

That text mode is a lot nicer, but you give up sprite support to use it.

First "real" program I ever wrote -- at age 12 or 13 was on TI-99/4A. I've never been into video games so I wrote a program to manage my paper route. Back then there were these paper publications called newspapers and kids could get jobs that entailed walking around the neighborhood without adult supervision and delivering the papers to houses. Also collecting money once a month.

I had a customer file (on cassette tape of course) and it tracked how much each customer owed, etc.

It was a spaghetti mess I'm sure as I knew nothing about programming but I got it to work.

Of course a paper ledger would have been just as good (and probably faster to use) but where's the fun in that?

I still have mine in the closet. I learned to code in TI BASIC on that beautiful machine. I've kept it for 35 years because it's the biggest single influence from my childhood on who I am today. I should pull it out and relive some old memories.

That said, there's no way in hell that video was a TI BASIC program. There were way too many sprites moving too smoothly around the screen. They must have made a custom cartridge.

I still have my first BASIC program for the TI-99 stored on a cassette in storage. My grandpa, who was an engineer at Parsons in Pasadena, bought it for me when I was 5 years old. My then 9-year old cousin then taught me how to program (Hi David, if you're reading this). We're both engineers now.

The program, incidentally, counts to 1,000,000 and outputs each number on the screen, it took 3 days to run.

Well, the cassette is certainly probably still where you put it...

My brother dropped off a box he saved for me a few years ago that contained my old TI tapes. A person on the TI-99/4A user group offered to read some in and provide emulator disk images. It actually worked and I was able to play the game I wrote back in 1982 again. Here's a screen shot http://i.imgur.com/4d74DqX.jpg

It was my first computer as well. I loved the crap out of that machine. I had Extended Basic, but I wish I had been able to get the editor/assembler cartridge and the expansion box. The voice synthesizer was one of my favorite things to play with. :)

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