Trying to trace my TI origins...

[cbmeeks]

I got my first TI-99/4a when I was 9 years old.  I turned 9 in June of 1982 (yes, I am old).

The TI was my first computer.  My family was really poor then and I suspect my grandmother bought it for me when the TI got "really cheap".

 

Does anyone know the timeline of TI's pricing (i.e., their price war with Commodore)?  For example, was it common to get TI's for $50 in late 1982 or was that later?

 

Any clues would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[+jedimatt42]

There is a bit of a price war story here https://oldcomputers.net/ti994a.html

[sometimes99er]

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_1064832

[sometimes99er]

https://99er.net/hist3.html

[+chue]

A history of Texas Instruments (the company) - price wars at about 33:20

[globeron]

The orphan chronicles on internet archive of R. Albright is a good read.

 

And home computer wars (more on commodore).

 

[cbmeeks]

Thanks everyone!

[matthew180]

On 3/28/2024 at 11:58 AM, cbmeeks said:

I got my first TI-99/4a when I was 9 years old.  I turned 9 in June of 1982 (yes, I am old).

 

Heh, around here you are a baby.   I was 12 in 1982 when I got my 99/4A.  We were a single income family and I don't know how my parents managed to afford the computer.  My dad bought it from JC Penny's when the cost was $150.  He was deciding between the 99/4A and C64 (both were about the same price), but he knew the TI brand from having a SR-56 programmable calculator, so that's what he picked.

[+Ksarul]

I had the great joy of ordering mine through the mail (I was in Berlin, Germany at the time) and received it just before Thanksgiving in 1981. I'd been using a friend's machine for about a year before that, and was comfortable with it (his was a 99/4 with the train). Right at the beginning of January 1982, TI dropped the price from $450 (what I paid in August of 1981) to $299. That was the first of many price changes. . .I've never regretted my purchase though, as that machine has given me much joy over the intervening decades.

[+FarmerPotato]

I first saw the 99/4 in about December 1980.  It was an Open House event for families at the Texas Instruments plant in Lubbock TX.     Then, the hottest TI product was the Digital Watch with calculator built-in.  Coming in second: must have been the helium balloons.   Next to the digital watches was a 99/4 (no A)  display and a crowd of people.  They were waiting to play 'Pot Shot' from the Video Games I module.  This was the store display, with modules on retractable steel cables.  We got watches for Christmas.  I was in 4th grade.

 

My dad brought home a 99/4 in March 1981, from the Texas Instruments employee store.  We used our cassette deck for everything.  For software, we had 'Oldies but Goodies 2' and 1 module, A-maze-ing.  Our dad said 'now learn to make your own software.'  So we did. 

 

I think we got Hunt the Wumpus and MunchMan in 1982.   I didn't see a 4A until Sep 1982, when Texas Instruments loaned 2 systems to our Boy Scout troop.  (Both of the Scoutmasters were from Texas Instruments.)  4As with the sidecars for disk and 32K.   Each Scout got one Inmac floppy disk.  The conditions were: we all had to earn the Computers merit badge and put on a big demo at Jamboree.  

 

We kept a 4A at home until Black Friday... when Texas Instruments said "no need to return them".   By then, I had spent hundreds of hours programming or typing in programs.  4A was my only computer thru 1988, when I worked all summer to buy a Geneve 9640.  Used that until 1992!

 

Still have a place in my heart for those sidecars.
 

The 4A with the loan sticker turned up in the basement yesterday.  

 

[Casey]

I received a beige 99/4A for Christmas in 1983 (I was 8 years old), and it was $50 then.  I remember asking for an Atari 2600 for Christmas that year and getting the TI computer instead (most likely because it was cheaper and my parents did not have a ton of money).  But I have that decision, and the 99/4A to thank for my interest in computers and my career today, so the beige 99/4A is very important to me for nostalgic reasons.

[matthew180]

This thread prompted me to better nail down the events of my 99/4A history.  After searching through a lot of magazines between 1981 and 1984 (thanks archive.org !!), I discovered a few things that I never knew, totally forgot, or was just oblivious to:

 

1. I got my 99/4A in July 1983 (I turned 13 in July) right in the middle of the $149 with a $50 rebate phase (so a $99 computer).  This was right on the heels of the $299 with a $100 rebate phase, and just before TI announced they were exiting (sometime in the fall), which caused the price to then drop to ~$50 in November 1984.  It was interesting to watch the prices dropping every few months in the magazine ads selling systems.

 

2. I did not realize the price war between TI and Commodore was with the 99/4A vs the VIC20!?!?  That was really really really stupid of TI!!  Even more stupid than I thought they were.  I always thought the price war was between the Atari 400, the C64, and the 99/4A.  There was no way TI could compete with the VIC20, and Commodore still got to sell the C64 for a good profit.  TI should have kept the 99/4A up in price with the C64 at the very least, and promoted software rather than trying to force licensing.  Really stupid.

 

3. By October 1983 Sears (and everywhere else) was blowing out their TI inventory, and a PEB with SSSD, disk controller, 32K, E/A, and LOGO 2 was available for $399.  I remember my dad took me to get one, which I really did not understand how we could afford that because we were not that well off.  Sears was out of stock, so my dad got a rain-check; I only remember that because I did not know what a rain-check was, I only knew we were leaving without a PEB...  Apparently Sears called in mid December that our PEB was in stock and my dad gave it to me for xmas.  I had totally forgotten about it by then, and was not expecting that under the tree.  Best xmas ever!

 

4. The 99/4A was released in June 1981, the IBM PC was released Aug 1981.  It must have been down hill for TI from then on.  I was oblivious to computers at this time (11/12 years old), and it was not until 1983 when I got the 99/4A that I seem to have become aware of, and really interested in, computers other than arcade coin-op games.

 

5. In Feb 1982, Compaq was started by three TI engineers who got fed up and left.  I had no idea.

 

6. There were awesome computer graphics in the late 70s and early 80s (even before TRON), and the home computer, as well as the lame CGA/EGA in the PC, were just horrible and a huge step backwards.  Yeah, I know, memory and cost, but memory prices dropped rapidly, yet we were then stuck with crappy hardware until the mid 90s.

 

IMO, computers were way more interesting BITD!

 

[+OLD CS1]

1 hour ago, matthew180 said:

yet we were then stuck with crappy hardware until the mid 90s.

 *AHEM*

 

1 hour ago, matthew180 said:

IMO, computers were way more interesting BITD!

Today's tech ain't got the same soul.

[+Lee Stewart]

My TI-99/4A journey started in December, 1983, when my first wife bought one for our kids for Christmas after the price drop to $50. I was 40! When TI released TI Forth into the public domain that same month, I was hooked.

 

I first signed on to AtariAge with this post in May of 2011:  

 

I’ve been enjoying interacting with this group ever since!  

 

...lee

[RickyDean]

9 minutes ago, Lee Stewart said:

My TI-99/4A journey started in December, 1983, when my first wife bought one for our kids for Christmas after the price drop to $50. I was 40! When TI released TI Forth into the public domain that same month, I was hooked.

 

I first signed on to AtariAge with this post in May of 2011:  

 

I’ve been enjoying interacting with this group ever since!  

 

...lee

Wow, the wealth of information that must lay in the years before I found Atariage in 2015, just before the Great Gazoo passed!!

[+OLD CS1]

19 hours ago, matthew180 said:

There were awesome computer graphics in the late 70s and early 80s (even before TRON), and the home computer, as well as the lame CGA/EGA in the PC, were just horrible and a huge step backwards.  Yeah, I know, memory and cost, but memory prices dropped rapidly, yet we were then stuck with crappy hardware until the mid 90s.

Been giving this a little more serious thought.  What was done here makes perfect sense from the IBM perspective.  The behemoth did not want anything which would sit on a desk to compete with its big iron.  That does not excuse other vendors, but it does seem, from my limited engagement, no one "mainstream" was trying out-perform the IBM standards in the beginning.  The ones who were -- Apple (Mac,) Commodore (Amiga,) and Atari (ST) -- with the exception of Apple, eventually caved to IBM compatibility.

[Krebizfan]

34 minutes ago, OLD CS1 said:

Been giving this a little more serious thought.  What was done here makes perfect sense from the IBM perspective.  The behemoth did not want anything which would sit on a desk to compete with its big iron.  That does not excuse other vendors, but it does seem, from my limited engagement, no one "mainstream" was trying out-perform the IBM standards in the beginning.  The ones who were -- Apple (Mac,) Commodore (Amiga,) and Atari (ST) -- with the exception of Apple, eventually caved to IBM compatibility.

IBM's original plans for the PC were to match the Apple II video mode for video mode. CGA and MDA were nice improvements on that with Hercules being a great budget monochrome graphics solution. Perq was the first widely available high resolution (1024x768) graphics system. The problem was the cost of memory. The 256KB needed for 640x480 with a sizable palette meant the video card had to cost at least $2,000 in 1980. Add to that a roughly $5,000 monitor and the system would be priced right out of business let alone the home. A few years later, IBM had the 3 card monster of PGC to supply 640x480 but the cost was still excessive. It took the development of the enhanced EGA cards to put 640x480 in reach. The EGA card needed 256K so it was just a simple matter of adding a few oscillators to hit the higher resolutions. The necessary monitor was still around a thousand dollars but that wasn't much of a stretch compared to legible EGA monitors. 

[+OLD CS1]

34 minutes ago, Krebizfan said:

IBM's original plans for the PC were to match the Apple II video mode for video mode.

Interesting twist.

[matthew180]

1 hour ago, Krebizfan said:

Perq was the first widely available high resolution (1024x768) graphics system.

 

True, but computer graphics on a CRT go back as far as 1963 with Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad, which can do things I still can't do today.  Then in 1968 Douglas Engelbart gave the Mother of All Demos (you should really watch this in YT, along with videos  about Sketchpad).

 

In 1973 Xerox created the Alto with 808x606 GUI, mouse, Ethernet, GUI, etc..  The Alto was not commercially available, but it heavily influenced the 1980 PERQ-1 (which is consider the first commercial workstation).

 

But before that, there were systems with frame buffers doing amazing things.  "The Works" never-finished animated short from New York Institute of Technology was started in 1979 with some very impressive 3D rendering capability.  And the hardware used for movies like TRON was being built many years before the movie released in 1982.

 

So, we had these great things, then IBM gave us CGA...

 

I understand the memory cost aspect, but memory prices dropped quickly during the 80s, but by then we were stuck with the myth of compatibility.

 

1 hour ago, OLD CS1 said:

What was done here makes perfect sense from the IBM perspective.  The behemoth did not want anything which would sit on a desk to compete with its big iron.

 

I don't think that was a consideration.  IBM was not into computer graphics, and their mainframes were not involved in that kind of stuff.  It was mostly research computers from MIT or other schools, or places like PARC.  Also, the PC was made in secret division of IBM in Boca Raton, away from the corporate prying eyes and influences, and my understanding from reading various accounts is, they could do pretty much what they wanted when creating the PC.  I think cost drove most of the decisions though.

[+OLD CS1]

2 hours ago, Lee Stewart said:

I’ve been enjoying interacting with this group ever since!  

Everyone loves The Nose!

[Geoff Oltmans]

As a kid, the 99/4A was my first "real computer". My dad bought a Timex Sinclair 1000 to start with that almost immediately was returned to the store and then got the 4A. The 4A was $310 from Kmart, and was shortly before they started dropping the price (Of this I am quite certain since my dad complained that he had lost a good bit of money on it when they dropped the price). I guess that would have been early 1983 and I would have been 7 by that time. I worked my way through a bunch of the type in programs in the manuals that came with it, played a bunch of Parsec, TI Invaders, and Munch Man. Learned a lot from it.

 

[+Lee Stewart]

1 hour ago, OLD CS1 said:

Everyone loves The Nose!

 

Yeah...I remember your tagging me with that moniker when I used this pic as my avatar on this forum:

 

...lee

[+FarmerPotato]

11 hours ago, matthew180 said:

In 1973 Xerox created the Alto with 808x606 GUI, mouse, Ethernet, GUI, etc..  The Alto was not commercially available, but it heavily influenced the 1980 PERQ-1 (which is consider the first commercial workstation).

Another interesting offshoot was Lilith (1976).  Niklaus Wirth was at Xeroc PARC in 1976 and used the Alto.  On returning to ETH Zurich, he had a small team create a "desktop workstation" by 1980.  It's really interesting reading, how Wirth re-created the Alto concepts in the Lilith workstation, starting with a very large bitmap display.  This article claimed about 310 in use.

 

 

[Kchula-Rrit]

All you people that got your systems in your single-digit years make me feel old!

At age 27 I bought my first TI with my tax return in 1983.  My ex and I rode the bus across town to a computer store that had several machines on display.  The Timex/Sinclair was disappointing, with that touch panel and blurry monochrome display.  Don't remember much about the Ataris they had.  The VIC-20 had only 5K RAM.

I was already leaning toward the TI, in part because I knew it had a 16-bit CPU.  The advertisement said it had 16K RAM, the most of any of the computers on display.  Imagine my disappointment when I found out the truth!

After handing over $250, we carried that huge box back across town on the bus, and an addiction was born.

Six years later I bought two consoles and an expansion box with Editor/Assembler, disk controller, RS232, and 32K RAM for $200 from a guy who was hoping to write games for it, but abandoned the effort.

K-R.

Edited April 4 by Kchula-Rrit

[99er]

As noted above, Ronald Albright's Orphan Chronicles can be found on the Internet Archive, but here is a direct link on 99er.net:

https://www.99er.net/download2/index.php?act=view&id=148

 

Here it is in MOBI format:

https://www.99er.net/download2/index.php?act=view&id=240

 

And for good measure, his Orphan Survival Handbook:

https://www.99er.net/download2/index.php?act=view&id=191

Edited April 6 by 99er