Last evening I did the first of many planned streams with my beloved TI-99/4A. Listeners of the podcast know that I’ve gone from thinking about getting into retro computing, to owning one, and now that one has become two.
The venerable TI-99/4A was my first computer and really marks the beginning of a life long journey. Not only was it the first computer I wrote code on (TI Basic) but this was the machine that I learned to type on. Back in the early 80s the idea of having a computer actually in your home was not yet commonplace. The Atari VCS (later named the 2600) had got people used to the idea of a video game console as a home appliance, but anything with a keyboard on it was still the domain of factories, banks, offices and weird nerds. That’s where I come in.
Cut to 43 years later, and here I am in a totally different world than those halcyon days, and although I always remembered my TI fondly (the original having been long gone in who-knows-what yard sale), it never occurred to me to look at it again. I’ve always assumed, quite wrongly as is turns out, that the retro computing field was just for nostalgia. While there is of course an element of that, that’s far from the whole story. Despite my love of music and fashion from 100 years ago, I’m not actually that keen on nostalgia. It’s a trap, locking us into a rose-coloured view of the past that is always… always… wrong.
It’s hard to say exactly why I decided to take the plunge and explore this world again, but it’s been a revelation. There has been so much work done with these machines since their heyday, and dedicated communities of both veterans and newcomers have done some truly innovative and revolutionary stuff.
And that’s the word: revolutionary. As I talked about on the podcast, what I did not expect to find was just how subversive the retro computing world is. The first time I interfaced my TI with a Raspberry PI so it could access a network interface, it struck me: This Isn’t Supposed To Happen. No one envisioned anything like this when these machines were new. This violates “the rules”. Having my TI interface with a naked PCB jacked into the expansion port and talk to a little PiZero literally dangling off it from wires is the most Cyberpunk I’ve ever felt.
Last night I did the first of what will assuredly be many live streams on the TI-99/4A, this time playing Tunnels of Doom, which I never did get to play when it was new. Even that was a revelation, and I was not expecting the level of sophistication in this extremely early dungeon crawling CRPG.
This is going to be a trip.
