alt Hacker NewsOh, alright...I'll be that guy. All respect to those infected with this particular strain of nostalgia, but I hated that piece of crap.
I was starting to program back in those halcyon days (BASIC and fortunately for my later life, Fortran), so my dad got me one. Probably because it was cheap. Cheap it was, and slow. Like, my friends VIC20 seemed faster (but then, he had a floppy, more on that later). And the games were mostly inferior to anything on something like the C64. And they were games none of my friends had, or more importantly, my friends had games I couldn't. And the business apps, according to my dad, were 'just shit'.
OK...I will give the thing one huge props: it had a relatively cheap voice synthesizer "sidecar" thing, that my dad actually sprung for. It. Was. AWESOME. Write a little BASIC program and a robot voice would call your friend a 'butthead' or something. For a couple of days I was the most popular kid in the neighborhood and everyone had to see (hear) this thing. And then...they all went "cool man, but we're gonna go and play Fargoal or Double Dragon or whatever that you don't have and don't know how to play". So back alone with my 99/4a calling my friends 'butthead', but now in a sad way.
But dad bought it for me to program on, so let's do that. The BASIC was...okay, I guess, but since it was some TI thing unrelated to MS BASIC used by pretty much everyone else at the time I couldn't compare notes with and get help from my friends with sane parents who had gotten their kids a C64, Atari 800 or TRS-80. The Logo cart was actually pretty fun, but it was also it's own thing and more of a toy to play with; moving the turtle around the screen got old quick. I probably should have gotten the assembler cart, but I didn't know that was probably the only way to really have fun programming the thing. Nut anyway...I'm a couple of BASIC programs in, and a floppy sure would be nice (read: required). Oh, you want floppy? You have to buy the giant expansion box, which is 5 times bigger than and costs more than the computer. And then buy the floppy. And probably a memory expansion.
At this point dad realized he'd been sold a bill of goods, did the math, knew what a sunk cost is, and went out and bought a TRS-80 4P for a lot more than the TI. Added CP/M, Turbo Pascal, 123 and Wordstar and a modem and I was off to the races. Got me all the way to my second year of college or so.
At some point in the '90s, a buddy showed me around his new job (manufacturing) and we spent some time on the TI-990 minicomputer he was in charge of. I remember thinking "if this is what is possible with a 9900, they had to have worked hard crippling it for the 99/4a".
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What do you expect for $50?
And at the end of it's life, the local Base Exchange was selling them for $50 along with a $99 rebate voucher. The offer didn't last for long, though my brother scrabbled enough cash to buy 5 of them, got the rebate checks and wound up making money on the deal. But then he had 5 99/4As that he couldn't even give away.
It was a bit of a crap-fest handicapped by bizarre corporate strategies from TI and a "baroque" internal architecture. But it was DURT CHEAP compared to "real" computers like PCs/clones, Apple ][s or CP/M devices.
(Not arguing with the fact that in 1983 when TI pulled out of the market, it was clear it was ready to move to a computer farm upstate. But none of us knew any better in '79 when the 99/4 was originally released. And besides, BILL COSBY was the spokes-person, so it COULDN'T be a bad machine!)
No argument, it was terrible. :) But still I had good times and started learning to program.
The assembler cartridge was nearly as useless as the BASIC cartridge for the Atari VCS. (Not that I ever tried the latter, but similar problems of very limited memory holding text you'd typed in, the assembled program, and whatever data it's processing at runtime -- and needing to save to cassette tape before you can start on anything else.) However, the CPU architecture actually did give you a nice clean assembly language once you had enough of a system to really code in it.
Being away from the mainstream... isn't an advantage but I'd have to call it part of my development as a programmer. I had to get into Forth for a reasonably powerful system.