Comment by abecedarius
2 days ago
There was a cartridge with an assembler & text editor plus a little CPU RAM. (4k? My memory is gone but it certainly wasn't much even for the 80s.) You'd still need to use cassette tape to save your work. Ah it was this: https://www.arcadeshopper.com/wp/ti-99-4a-faq-mini-memory/
For actually usable development you could buy a TI expansion box, 32K RAM expansion, and 5 1/4" floppy drive. This cost the equivalent of like two thousand bucks today. Less than an Apple ][, somewhat more than a base C-64, but a lot more than the TI-99 itself.
My parents were very indulgent in this. Once I had this setup, I bought a third-party Forth and coded my own Forth assembler vocabulary, and finally had a reasonably capable dev env, for maybe a year before leaving for college. But still had basically no way to share my work (wasn't online).
The mini-memory cart has 4k of CPU RAM and a line-by-line assembler, no text editor.
It also has no disassembler. I spent many many hours dumping the ROMS using easy-bug and disassembling them by hand. Many happy hours.
Thanks for the correction. From my link:
> Each source statement you enter is immediately assembled into object code and stored into memory. Some source code is retained in a nine-page text buffer. You can scroll the screen to review previously entered lines of source code by pressing the Up- and down-arrow keys.
I gave up on this system pretty quick -- with so little space for your code, it just wasn't worth so much trouble.