Saturday, November 14, 2015

My Introduction to Programming - BASIC on the TI-99/4A



My first step into the world of computer programming was with my first computer, the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A when I was 11 or 12 years old in the early 1980s. It didn’t have a monitor, it was just hooked up to a small TV in my bedroom. While I did have a few of the game cartridges, like TI Invaders and Parsec, the cartridge that was most often plugged in was the TI Extended BASIC cartridge. Extended BASIC enhanced the functionality of TI BASIC.



I have my Uncle Marty Samuelson to thank as the one who first got me into programming. He’s the one who encouraged my parents to get me this first computer and he showed me how to write my own programs instead of just playing the game cartridges. He gave me issues of computer magazines like, COMPUTE!, that had whole programs listed out in them, numbered line by numbered line. These programs were usually games and I would slowly type them in. I just found PDFs of some issues of COMPUTE! online and I was surprised that just seeing them instantly brought back the smell of those printed pages. Typing in one program could take multiple days and so, in between, I would save my partial programs on the attached cassette tape recorder. I didn’t have the 5 ¼ inch floppy drive so I saved them on tape. I remember listening to several minutes of “ch-con ch-con ch-con” sounds each time I saved or reloaded programs into memory. After days of typing in the whole program I would run it and hope it would work. Almost always I learned that I had made a typo or two somewhere and I would have to find and fix the errors.

I didn’t understand all the code I was typing in but I learned from it and could soon write my own basic programs. When I had a computer class in junior high, in the 7th grade I think, we used BASIC on the TI so I already knew most of what was being taught and I enjoyed helping out other students. One of the funnest things we did was to program and use the speech synthesizer. The voice was pretty robotic but you could make it say whatever you wanted. I know I made a few prank phone calls with that from home. I always wished that I had a modem, like Matthew Broderick’s character in the movie War Games, so I could have done and learned more but it was a good start for my journey in programming.

Type In Program in TI BASICfrom COMPUTE!


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