Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft
17 days ago
>My Dad was convinced by the marketing that its 16-bit CPU was the wave of the future,
I think my mom was convinced because of bargain bin prices after it was more or less dead as a platform. But I'm not sure, she's not around to ask anymore... I've read though that after TI gave up on it, some department stores were dumping them for well under $100, and sometimes closer to $50.
I think I only once, ever, got it to load a saved program from cassette. I don't know if I was just a moron as a kid, or if they were actually that horrible for storage.
Tape save and load seemed pretty reasonable on our system. It does depend rather on the tape deck you're using and also on getting the volume and tone settings right, though. We had the official TI tape deck for it.
I arguably owe a successful career in tech to my dad seeing a $99 deal on a TI-99 after they were discontinued in the mid 80's and buying it just because he had had a shortwave receiver as a child and saw some weird similarity. Unbeknownst to him, it turned out my mother had been a FORTRAN programmer in the 70's (though she described it as working as a lab-tech in a bio lab), and taught me how to program it in its weird BASIC dialect.