I’ve been interested in tech for a long looooong time. One of my favorite memories from my childhood was my TI-99/4A computer. I think I got it for Christmas in 1983. 16K of memory, a cassette recorder for storage, that goofy keyboard layout, and I loved it.
I spent untold hours of my youth programming that thing. What a great time. I found some video of the computer in action recently on YouTube. Join me for a trip down 16K memory lane…
Video Demo
Commercial 1 – Smart Kid
Commercial 2 – Dumb Kid
Commercial 3 (Bill Cosby!)
Of course, in between programs I also played my fair share of games. Here’s some of my faves:
Munchman – My mom and I played this for hours! We had a pattern that never failed.
Car Wars – I liked my games hard, fast, and noisy!
Alpiner – This game still looks like fun!
Parsec – It took me forever to learn how to refuel.
Anyway, it’s this little computer that really got me interested in tech, and I still remember it fondly. Sigh…
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Oh Car Wars. It turns out that at that time I was working for a company called Steve Jackson Games and they had a popular game called Car Wars. Not a problem until Origin Systems (the guys that made Ultima) decided to turn Car Wars into a computer game and ran afoul of TI's copyright for digital games. Eventually all of the lawyers got together and got big and fat and the new game was released under the title of "Autoduel" with quite possibly the world's longest copyright disclaimer. Ah, good times. 🙂
Running afoul is always bad…
And running fowl can be problematic as well. 😉
Man oh man. That plinky, plinky, plinky midi music is the most annoying thing — and *sniff* nostalgic, too.