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The 8-Bit Era's Weird Uncle: The TI-99/4A

(bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com)
168 points rbanffy | 1 comments | 16 Feb 25 18:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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PeterStuer ◴[20 Feb 25 12:12 UTC] No.43113776[source]▶
I had a TI-99/4A. I learned to program from the excellent Basic manual that came with it. I wrote my code on paper, then keyed it in to run.

I mainly wrote basic games for my friends. Most popular was a two player competetive snakes variant, a bit like Tron but with traces only growing as you gobbled up food. I also wrote a 'defender' like game that enjoyed some success amongst friends.

I had no periperals or cartridges as that was too expensive. The living room TV was my monitor. It was quite a while before I got a cassette tape player, so in the early days a computer session started by retyping all code from my notebook.

I later got a ZX Spectrum which was far more powerfull, but the TI (and a HP41cv) are what got me into programming.

replies(2): >>43118376 #>>43120417 #
1. sumtechguy ◴[20 Feb 25 18:38 UTC] No.43118376[source]▶
I too learned a lot from that book.

It was not until years later I actually understood what I was doing. The little dancing guy was magic when I did it the first few times. Now I see it as a boring little program that loads up a bitmap into memory and then hangs out in a loop. I think the 'magic' may be gone :)