TI-99/4A Floppies

On Monday 01 October 2007 15:19, Mark Meiss wrote: I remember back when we were talking about getting a computer for the first time... She called my attention to the fact that there was this local place advertising that machine "for only $149"... So we went up there and talked to them about it. My thoughts at that time were that to have something useful you'd need at least two floppy drives. I also thought that more memory than what came in the basic unit wasn't a bad idea, either. The sales dude did some figuring, and when the expansion box, the memory, and the drives were all added in the total came to something over $1,000 -- not as good a deal as it looked like, at the time. :-) I also didn't consider that it had only a 40-column screen, either. Having done a bunch of work on C64s, and having gotten (eventually) an Osborne Executive which came with a built-in monitor showing an 80-column screen, I think I probably would've found that hard to live with as well. I suspect that that machine was an attempt to make a "computer appliance" which would provide a platform for commercial software or similar, and it wasn't even that good at that. <shrug> I never got one, never played around with one, but I don't think I'm missing much. -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin