- 5 hours
This was my first home computer as a kid. I didn’t have much use for the gigantic HDD addon (the large Betamax looking thing under the screen here), but the voice synthesizer was kinda awesome. It was had a similar robotic voice, though lower quality, to the one in the movie War Games. It defaulted to loading TI Basic when you didn’t have a cartridge or diskette inserted, so I inadvertently ended up learning to program out of boredom at a very early age.
5 hoursI wondered! The display and KB looked familiar but I’d never seen the box, was puzzled.
- 5 hours
My dad bought it for us with the rest, which was typical in how irresponsible he tended to be with money. It had something like 10MB capacity IIRC, which was more than it sounds as you were mostly just saving text.
Edit: I just caught that you mentioned the display. No one I knew bought the official tiny display, you could hook it to any TV just fine (it used the little antenna hooks like an Atari 2600 and everything else at the time)
All my friends had different computers at the time and they all hooked into normal TVs. Makes me wonder if anyone bought the “special” monitors. VIC-20 represent!
- 1 day
You could also get it configured like this if you had a really wide desk
- 5 hours
Yeah, the peripherals just daisy chained to the right. I never saw most of them in use, the tiny one in the pic is the voice synth.
Completely ignoring the endorsement - this was not the one. It used a 9918 video chip, which was alright for pre-NES consoles, but took a ton of VRAM to do anything interesting. Therefore the goofy early 16-bit CPU (some TI dead end I won’t even bother looking up) was given a paltry modicum of work RAM, and had to store most of its data by going through the video chip. I’d say third parties struggled with this, the way NES developers struggled to make that machine interesting, except Texas Instruments did not believe in third parties. They wanted all the revenue for themselves, and what little there was, they got it.
There’s a reason they’re only known for calculators now.
- 5 hours
This PC was interesting because it was in an odd middle ground of personal computer and video game console, while trying to be low priced like the latter. It had a lot of “edutainment” stuff for kids (I suffered through these as a kid), but you’re right that hardware-wise, it was pretty lame. PCs were so new that most people didn’t know it was lame yet of course, only that it didn’t have a lot of software selection.
- 5 hours
The hardware was capable, if you jumped through your butt, and the primary failing was that nobody was allowed to try. There’s a demoscene prod by Desire - because every platform has a demo by Desire - called Don’t Mess With Texas. That shows off what you were missing, when TI was playing stupid games about who was allowed to develop their stupid games.
