TI99 (was Re: 8088s seattle comp.)

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Tue Jun 10 08:18:42 1997

> Personally, my opinion of the TI-99/4a varies from stupid piece of shit
> to semi-decent machine. Today I feel like stupid piece of shit. It was
> almost completely closed, it's BASIC sucked and was slow, it's keyboard

I have two of the beasts and a expansion box with floppy, ram, aftermarket
ram and rs232 and ever the little talker thing and a box of games.

It is slow. The manuals for the cpu and expansion were available, I got
them. It's a compilation of the things you can do to a good cpu to make it
run slow and try to do everything.

> but then, I came from the world of Apple ][, to which nothing could
> compare (uh oh, here come the holy wars).

It's attraction? One it was cheaper than an apple with disks! When TI had
the great sell off the console was $50, expansion $50, and modules $25-100.
That made it appealingly cheap for what it was. I got my during the fire
sale so they have been with me since new and work great. Parsec is still
a favorite game. Since I have the editor, assember and other packages
I also use it for assembly of TI9900 code for the technico board.

An aside: The ti994a was an attempt at the time of emerging PCs to deliver
the home computing applance. Everyone had an idea and generally the all
were poor. Even the original PC was really bad, mostly closed design. They
were all noteable as it told marketers what would fly and what had to be
there. Amusingly the ti has what every P5 box has today, graphics, sound,
games so they weren't that far off <in a perverse sort of way>.


Allison
Received on Tue Jun 10 1997 - 08:18:42 BST