I was Newly Digital

It started with a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a computer. We had to drive 85 miles to Computerland in Reno to get it because to the stores in our small town didn’t sell so much as a Pong machine. I don’t remember much about the store except I didn’t understand why we were there and like any kid, I hated shopping and wanted to leave. But then my dad carried out the big box with the cool pictures on the side and my excitement started to grow.

My friends Shane and David each had an Atari 2600. We would play Breakout, Pitfall, and other games. The games were interesting, but the graphics quality was lacking. Since the local grocery store had an Asteroids arcade game, I knew it was possible to have games where ships looked like ships instead of square blocks. One look in the bag of game cartridges held by my dad showed me I was right. There were space games that had real space ships. Cars that had wheels. I couldn’t wait to get home and try it out.

At home Dad hooked the computer up to the TV and showed me how to work it. Flip this switch to change the TV input from antenna to the computer. Put in the cartridge, turn on the power. We played Parsec, Tombstone City, Alpiner, and Car Wars for hours. Dad had gotten the TI speech synthesizer module, and our games actually talked to us. My friend’s Ataris had never done that.

After a few months of using the TI-99 as a game system I started to read the books that came with the computer. What else could this thing do? What I discovered is that the keyboard had a purpose beyond typing in my initials for game high scores. I could type in a few strangly-worded phrases and the computer would draw lines on the screen and make sounds. It was my first introduction to programming, and I loved it. The only thing that kept me from writing more complex BASIC programs was that the computer had no storage at all. Once the computer was turned off, my work was gone forever.

Sure, I’d try to keep it alive by leaving the computer on for days at a time, but it wasn’t a practical solution. Sometimes the power would fail. Sometimes a well-meaning parent would notice the computer had been left on and would turn it off. Whatever the cause, the result was always the same. Hours poured into creating a simple game or teaching the computer to sing a melody were gone.

Eventually we got a casette tape drive so I could store my programs and save my place in Tunnels of Doom or Adventure. My prgrams grew in size, no longer constrained to how much I could type in one sitting. With rural power outages, I quickly learned the value of saving my work, first on the tape drive and later on the floppy disks of the school computers.

A lot of the fundamentals of my computing life and career can be traced back to my time with the TI computer. Save your work, plan what you are going to build before you start to work and test it when you are done. In other words, measure twice, cut once.