Many of my projects have a long history, having been kicked around for years, so I’ll regale their tales over multiple updates.

Back before there were Macs and PCs, there was Texas Instrument. The company is still around today but seems to play a less prominent role in normal techies lives (i.e., mine). TI was even common place in schools once the TI-83 calculators became standard issue. These mechanical marvels allowed way-to-fancy ways to solve mathematical equations. And at home, my friends and I had the TI-99/4A.

The TI99/4A was the definition of old school. There were no windows, you saved to cassette tapes, and the “modem” looked like a block of plastic with two cup holders. Running at a maximum of 300 baud (for the youngins, a baud is a measure of speed so slow that it is now obsolete), the acoustic modem required the user to manually dial a number and place a telephone handset inside the device’s cups in order to make a connection. Brilliant!

I can’t remember how useful the TI99/4A was for the typical work you use a computer for nowadays, but it did gaming just fine in the early 80′s. One of the games available for the system was a space shooter named Parsec. And I was addicted to this game.

More later…

—Ryan