99/4A 4 Life

If you’re anywhere near my age, and somehow reading this, I’ll bet you had a consumer product made by Texas Instruments in your house. Maybe you still do.

It could have been a basic calculator. It could have been a graphing calculator. It could have been a Speak & Spell, or its lesser known brothers the Speak & Math or Speak & Read.

At one time or another, I had them all.

And, of course, I had - and still have - the TI 99/4A Home Computer.

Texas Instruments was the first brand that I remember identifying with. I probably would have wanted to wear TI t-shirts if they’d existed. Shucks, I’d probably wear a TI t-shirt today if you send me one that fits. I mean, I thought Texas was important because of Texas Instruments. I don’t remember anybody saying boo about Texas for any other reason except football.

There are four categories of people reading this right now:

1) People who have zero clue what on earth any of this is about. If you are in this category, you probably think I’m a weird old man.

2) People who vaguely remember the existence of the TI 99/4A so they have at least a shred of understanding. If you are in this category, you might at first think I’m a weird old man, but then you stop and wonder what that makes you.

3) People who very much remember the 99/4A and may even have owned it, but who weren’t necessarily passionate about it. If you are in this category, you were probably a Commodore or Apple devotee, or somehow you got sucked into the Tandy realm, in which case, you are probably a weird old man.

4) People who readily understand all of this. My tribe. Also, probably weird old men.

(A word here. Obviously there are women reading this as well. The thing is, every woman I’ve ever mentioned TI to has wound up in the first category. I am not trying to claim that any women reading this are, in fact, weird old men. Just so we’re clear on that.)

The 99/4A came out in June 1981. (Its precursor, the 99/4, had come out in October 1979.) For reference, the Commodore 64 came out in 1982; and the Apple IIc came out in 1984. (This was the ‘80s; things didn’t “drop” back then, okay?)

Unlike other contemporaries like the Atari 2600, the 99/4A (like the C64 and IIc) was a real computer, not just a video game system. You could program with it (albeit mostly using TI BASIC), and the cartridges available for it included not just games and some pseudo-educational things, but also productivity software. Cartridges were made of hard plastic with a solid state chip sticking out which could be read by the machine. The 99/4A could also read data off of 5 1/4” floppy disks and, more famously, off of audio cassettes.

For some reason, my grandmother bought a 99/4A early on. I don’t know why she chose that over anything else. I don’t know why she chose to buy anything of its kind at all. But she did, and as a result, as far back as I can remember, she had a 99/4A hooked up to a 13” color TV in the office, which meant I was playing Munch Man at age 5, and not too long thereafter, was first learning to program by following the instructions in the green BASIC guide that came with the computer.

Well, some 35 years later, it has turned out that by day I’m a software engineer, which is a fancy way of saying a programmer, and the language I primarily use is COBOL, which technically dates to 1959 and which we don’t really need to talk about - ever - except to note that for me it’s very reminiscent of BASIC. I’m writing this post now with COBOL programs hiding in another window of my laptop, and with two TI 99/4As in the room, one behind me and one off to my right. Neither are plugged in at the moment, but the one off to the right does have a BurgerTime cartridge in it.

In addition to the two 99/4As, I also have a drawer full of ridiculous crap - a lot of old cartridges, a Speech Synthesizer, two cassette recorders, some wires, manuals for some of the old cartridges, and cassettes which may very well not work anymore, because cassette tape wasn’t rated for 35 years, and which I’m kind of afraid to even try using, because I’d kind of like to hold onto the fantasy that I can actually load BASIC programs I wrote when I was 8 years old and that this would somehow be meaningful.

There are some things I wish I still had, like the Terminal Emulator cartridge. With this cartridge, we were able to go into TI BASIC and make the computer talk. We’d have it say things like “Phil and Charlie are wearing the same sweater”, but its command of language was limited, so it would pronounce “sweater” as “SWEET-er”, which was somehow uproariously funny. There were games that could talk too - Alpiner, Parsec, Microsurgeon, even Star Trek - but writing a little program to get the computer to say silly things was the most fun of all. This was back at a time when there wasn’t anything else remotely like it on the market. Even better, at one point, we had a programming guide which would allow us to change the computer’s voice; we could actually get it to talk in a female voice, and I feel like it was a decade later before anything was on the market which could not only talk but change voices like this.

Most of the time, though, was just spent playing Hustle or Chisholm Trail or Tombstone City or other such nonsense. There were also some arcade games ported over, like Q*Bert and Donkey Kong. And, it being a real computer and all, my grandmother even had some of that productivity software. The cartridge I specifically remember was called Personal Record Keeping, and, well, I used that too. I’m not exactly sure what in blue blazes I used it for, but, yes, I was creating absurd 16-bit relational databases when I was 9 years old or so.

Last fall, I drove up to Evanston for the 2018 Chicago TI International World Faire. I didn’t have to travel too far, unlike the guy who came from Amsterdam for the event. This year’s event will also be in Evanston. Here’s a paragraph of information about it off of a relevant web page:

The 37th annual Chicago TI International World Faire will take place on the weekend of November 2, 2019, in Evanston, IL. The Faire itself runs from 9:30 a.m. until 4 p.m. Following the Faire, a banquet will be held at a local restaurant, where the John Birdwell Award will be presented. A jury of volunteers will be selected to evaluate various TI websites, and upon completion of the judging, the Rob Tempelmans Plat Award will be sent to the year's recipient. The Faire is usually preceded on Friday by an informal gathering of TIers at a local watering hole. The Faire, being over, a hardy group of adventurous souls set out on the infamous "Pub crawl." Survivors, (if any!), gather Sunday morning for breakfast before heading home. More information about all these activities will be posted here before the events. Watch this page.

(I did not go to last year’s banquet, which I believe was held at Panera, so I did not see who won the John Birdwell Award or Rob Tempelmans Plat Award, nor am I at all sure what any of this really means.)

The three or so hours I spent at the Faire itself were delightful, albeit frequently bewildering. Many opinions were offered about TI Forth, an apparently more powerful programming language that… well, I don’t really know. There were people there who had somehow made their own game cartridges at some point in the last five years. There was also a 5-10 minute exploration through documentation to try and figure out whether the cool alternate packaging for Car Wars was from the European release. (Turned out, it was from the Canadian release. (We may as well have been researching Pavement CD singles. No, I think that song is only on the Australian version.))

All of this was essentially an exercise in nostalgia. Nostalgia is fascinating. (Talking about nostalgia is very much ripe for a blog called META-SPIEL, for those of you still wondering what this madness is about.) I’m more attuned to thinking about nostalgia in the abstract, maybe, because my background is in history (20th Century U.S. in particular, and at the end of my degree work I was leaning hard into cultural history), or maybe because I just seem to remember this kind of crap especially well. Or maybe it’s because the things I’m nostalgic about are just different.

I believe that without trying very hard, you can unearth people who insist that movies went downhill some time after 19-whatever, or that rock and roll peaked at roughly the time that Bad Company came out, or that fashion went off the rails decades ago, or that cars just haven’t been good for 50 years… and they will believe this shit. They will say it with conviction, and they will absolutely believe the hell out of it. Not only will they believe it, they will internalize it. If you offer a sufficiently contrary viewpoint, you will not only be wrong, you will be attacking their past.

Now, I can think back and tell you how awesome the Speech Synthesizer for the 99/4A was, or how much fun it was to play Zero Zap. But I can’t seriously argue that things were all just better then. I don’t even think the regulars at the International Faire would attempt to convince you that things were better with just 16 bits. They might argue that the limitations of the day forced people to be especially creative, and that certain kinds of creativity are lacking today, or something like that, but that’s a very different, more narrow sort of argument. They might even be sincere in telling you that they prefer the way things used to be, and they might believe that in some way or another we’ve collectively lost our way, but what they can’t credibly attempt - even in their own minds - is to argue is that the way things were is the way things still ought to be.

Now, my point isn’t that things today are necessarily better than they ever have been, in movies or music or fashion or cars or video games or anything at all. The thing is that with computing, with video games in particular, what was available in its nascent days may well have been fun and awesome, but the sheer power available now makes all of that stuff into ancient technology. And so if you really love the old shit, you just have to say you love the old shit. You don’t need to justify it with some tortured argument about it having been “better”, so you don’t. (When I got an NES Classic recently so that my kid and I could play Super Mario Bros. 3 or whatever else, it was because it was something I knew to be fun, and which wouldn’t require an investment of my time in figuring out what to do, not because I thought the NES was the end-all, be-all of video game technology.)

Much of what passes for nostalgia, though, is so saturated with justification that you get the feeling that the artifact or memory in question isn’t really the point. If you prefer a simple but powerful three chord riff from Mick Ralphs, that doesn’t need to have anything to do with whatever passes for pop music today, and you don’t need to justify that to me or anyone else. (I might prefer that riff too!) If you prefer your small town upbringing and Friday night high school football and many of the trappings you associate with it, you don’t need to justify that to me or anyone else either. Really, you don’t. But when you complain about how nothing sounds like Paul Rodgers wailing away anymore; and then that complaint slips into a place where you’re whining about how we all just really need to get back to a “simpler time”; and it turns out that what’s encoded in your complaint is that not everything is by and for white guys anymore, well, that’s not exactly nostalgia anymore. Nostalgia implies sentimentality, not lamentation. If what you’re focused on is the lamentation - on the perceived loss of your perceived place in the hierarchy - well, I’m not going to beat you up here. Rather, I’m going to argue something you don’t often hear: White male privilege did you wrong, too.

(I wrote a couple more paragraphs here along similar lines. But then I thought about it and I thought, well, I think I said what I wanted to say already, now I just want to get back to name-dropping ridiculous games, like The Attack. The Attack was a terrible game though. Please don’t play The Attack.)

On the one hand there is something ridiculous in wanting to share your childhood experiences with your kid, especially when those experiences are anachronistic and absurd. It’s a lot easier to make sense of playing baseball together than it is to act like playing A-MAZE-ING together is anything but you being a dork.

But step back and think about it all in more of an anthropological sense. Think about immigrants who came to America and brought their traditions, but three generations on, most of those traditions have been lost. Think about the indigenous languages people are desperately trying to save. I want to stress here that preserving Inuktitut is not something I’m trying to put on the same level as playing Sneggit. Rather, I’m thinking more broadly about the idea that where we come from matters. I think for a lot of us, if the “where” is something like Northern Illinois in the 1980s, we can be hard-pressed to declare that to be a meaningful “where”. It’s not Sicily or Armenia or Mindanao or whatever. In the American historical tradition, Northern Illinois isn’t a place where people “are from”, it’s a place where people “came to”. The thing is, I can trace family back more than 10 generations in America. Yes, hundreds of years ago, most of “my people” came from somewhere in Britain. But over one hundred direct ancestors were born “here”. Maryland. South Carolina. New Hampshire. Kentucky. Pennsylvania. Kansas. Indiana. Alabama. Iowa. Illinois.

Not only was I born “here” and were my parents born “here” and so forth, but have you seen the pace of change in the last century or so? If you want to understand how America became America, you need to understand how this became a country where everybody has a car, and you need to understand how this became a country where everybody has a computer, and a smartphone, and all of this other silly crap that we think we can’t live without. And maybe the best way to establish those connections with our children - the ones inheriting the unbelievable mess that has been created by all of this shit that’s been made, especially over the last hundred years, is to sit down with them and…

Well, I suppose I’m just coming up with an extremely tortured anthropological justification to sit down and play TI Invaders.

But, isn’t that kind of core to what America is? A series of extremely tortured justifications for things? My kid will need to learn that at some time if he’s going to navigate this madness. For that matter, it sure would be nice if millions of My Fellow Americans understood this as well. Maybe then things wouldn’t be such a disaster, and I’d feel less guilty for wasting my time playing horrendously old video games.

Anyway, if you’ve got a TI t-shirt sitting around, feel free to send it my way. Yeah, I abhor brand culture as much as anyone, but hey, that’s my tribe, isn’t it?