A Successful Failure: The TI-99/4A Turns 40
My family had one of these when I was 12 or 13. The games I remember include a Pac-Man clone called “Munchman,” but I think I remember learning BASIC, blocky computer graphics, word-processing, and using a speech-synthesizer. The TI-99/4A was a great computer to learn on. I remember making a Star Trek combat simulator (based on the text-only battle games that were popular at the time), and I remember being incredibly frustrated, that in order to get a “+” sign, you pushed “shift” and the “=” button; but that in order to quit a program, you pushed “function” and the…