So there I was, minding my own business, doom-scrolling my way through Facebook posts when I happened upon one that hit me straight in the nostalgia. A photo of a 1980s home computer, a cassette player and some tapes. The text underneath proclaimed "In the 1980s, people could download video
And Programs/Games came on Casettes :)
You had cassettes? We had to manually transcribe machine code from printed listings.
Just in case, no it’s not a joke.
Examle: Book - 101 BASIC games: https://archive.org/details/101basiccomputer0000davi
well yeah and because you don’t want to type the listing down all over again, you save it onto tape.
I have a 40 year old book about TI BASIC somewhere in the garage plus some magazines with games. I built a fantasy game and saved it to cassette.
For a ti-99/4a? Me too! It was my favorite thing (up until my dad bought a used 286 from work, then skipped a few generations and went right to a Pentium 133)
That’s the one! It’s also in the garage. Still worked a while back when I hooked it up through a few adapters.
I always dumpster dived for computers. My buddy showed me where to go and when so we’d upgrade every year together when one of the local junior colleges threw out a bunch of stuff. We were always a few years behind but we had more tech toys than folks on the edge of poverty had the chance to pick up back in those days.
I remember being a teen in the late 90s with some computers to use and some to sell and we ended up selling enough to both get Bigfoot drives. A couple of gigs was MASSIVE compared to the TI stuff we both started on.
He’s still got the tax software with the booklet and ads featuring Bill Cosby running around somewhere. He’s also got a tattoo of the motherboard of the TI-99/4a because he said without it he wouldn’t be where he is today. But he doesn’t like Bill Cosby anymore.
We played the same game! Thats how I ended up with a DEC pizza box (multia with an alpha 166 processor) and a SparcStation. Then I’d take them over with me to the computer show (it was more like a flea market, its unfortunate they no longer exist) after I played with them to trade - thats how I was able to get my hands on a 1x (yes you read that right) CD burner.
Good times!
Same, except we had a cyrix processor
That was my followup to the P133, a Cyrix MII chip (when they added MMX to the series), with the 266mhz chip! Ran like shit 😄. I think I replaced that with a K6.
Those were… Quickly changing times haha