TI 99/4A

Our first home computer was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. It looked like silver typewriter with white letters on black keys.  The keys were cube like and could migrate painlessly to an adding machine. It was set up in the family room in the front corner right by a window. Games and accessories would magically appear. I don’t recall them being purchased or arriving in the mail.

It used cartridges and cassette tapes. Loading games on cassette tapes was weird. Sometimes, we’d have to pop in tape number two to get it loaded. Some I’m sure were bootlegged. My dad eventually upgraded to 5 1/4” floppy disk drive. The ‘Peripheral Expansion System,’ a shiny metal box with eight slots with a wide black connector cable, housed the drive. I have no idea what lived in the other slots. The floppy disks lived in a plastic box with a clear smoky lid that was hinged to its beige body. You could tell the bootlegged ones based on how they were labeled – white oblong stickers showcasing my Dad’s horrible handwriting.

The best peripheral we had was the plug-in speech synthesizer module. The day it arrived, my brother and I plugged it in and got the computer to say naughty words! Our parents either were not paying attention that afternoon or found our naughtiness amusing. It wasn’t an enduring amusement, the words weren’t enunciated clearly. We gave up on it soon after.

We had several cartridge games – Tombstone City, TI Invaders, Tunnels of Doom and an educational game that had a grammar menu game. TI Invaders was a straight rip off of Space Invaders. The key was to shoot through your shield, as everyone who has watched Futurama knows. Tunnels of Doom was a classic dungeon crawl in 8 bit. All I remember of Tombstone was the tumble weeds. I think their threat was tumbling, they’d tumble you to death.

I vividly recall the menu game. I remember playing it for all my allotted computer time. eBay was helpful in finding game names. There are so many games for sale! Good thing I’m sticking to my no-more-collections rule or else I’d end up with a TI-99 and a ton of games competing with my Funko Pops for space. It could be the charmingly named ‘Beginning Grammar’ or ‘Early Reading’ or ‘Early Learning Fun’ or ‘Reading On’.

I spent hours looking for the difference between those cartridges. I finally found TI-99/4A-Pedia which has an extensive library of scanned manuals. There, in the manual for Beginning Grammar I found it – Adjective’s Restaurant! Not only did I find it, I found three variations of the packaging.

The first was the original graphic which is the one we had. The second one had a Kmart price sticker on it. It looks very Holly Hobby-esque and the last one has Raggedy Ann and Andy. Maybe there was a copyright issue? The psychedelic movie ‘Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure‘ came out in 1977. Maybe TI swooped up the rights and had plans of rag dollies luring youngsters to the Land of Correct Grammar? This mystery will endure.