Happy 40th Birthday to my TI-99/4A.
It was my intro to home computing and served me well till I upgraded to a Wang 386.
It was fun toying around with TI-Basic and connecting to BBS's with my 14.4 modem.
The kids and I played many games, some times for hours.
It's still out in my garage buried under a lot of other junk. I haven't opened the box in decades.
?width=598&trim=1,1&bg-color=000&pad=1,1
Link: https://www.howtogeek.com/731558/a-successful-failure-the-ti-994a-turns-40/
AllaN01Bear
(23,800 posts)i be u have forgotten a lot like me .
Ron Obvious
(6,261 posts)I even got the expansion set with the (90k) floppy drive.
Remember Tunnels & Trolls and Parsec? I once had a game going that lasted literally hours.
Never was much of a game player before or since, though.
hunter
(39,224 posts)I also built a ZX81 from kit.
I've still got most of my Atari and Sinclair stuff but it's not in collectible condition because I was always hacking it.
Before that I built two COSMAC 1802 computers. I still have the second 1802 machine, which has parts cannibalized from the first.
The earliest computers I built used telephone relays, lots of diodes, and Nixie tubes.
As someone accustomed to the architectures of the PDP-11, 1802, and 6502 processors, the architecture of the TMS9900 microprocessor used in the TI-99/4A was strange to me and I didn't have any good reason to explore it.
My favorite computer today is the Raspberry Pi. The new Raspberry Pi 400 is reminiscent of older computer-in-the-keyboard machines like the TI-99/4A or Sinclairs.
w