One thing that I learned about taking programming courses in college was that I really enjoyed programming computers. It was the first subject that I took that I liked so much that I worked on my own projects in my own time just because it was so much fun. I decided that I wanted my own home computer so that I could do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. Unfortunately I didn't have a lot of money to spend. Anything with disk drives was prohibitively expensive.

By this time there were a lot of inexpensive home computers on the market, but I settled on the Texas Instruments 99/4A. I had started programming on Texas Instruments programmable calculators, so I already had an affinity for the company, but I also liked the 99/4A. The other choices were Commodore, Atari, and some others. I'm sure that they were all fine machines, but they looked like toys. The TI99/4A, with its brushed aluminum casing and gloss black keys and trim, was a very handsome computer. It looked high-tech.

The first thing that I learned about the computer was that it was much more graphically oriented than the VT-100 had been. The second thing that I learned was that cassette tape was an intolerable medium to store programs. The fact that you had to manually fast-forward the tape to the point that the program began was bad enough, but it was so slow that it was simply impractical. I did write a few programs, but I couldn't really do anything big and sophisticated because the save and load times were just too long.

Texas Instruments did make a disk drive unit for the 99/4A. I would go to the store and gaze longingly at the box on the shelf, but it was way too expensive. It cost many times more than the computer itself. When I learned that TI was discontinuing their computer line, I thought that maybe the store would sell it to me cheap just to get rid of it. No such luck. They wouldn't budge from the exorbitant sticker price.

With no hope of getting a disk drive I quickly out-grew the TI99/4A. It wasn't long before it went back in its box where it stayed for years and years. But I never got rid of it. It was still the first computer I ever owned, and I wanted to hold on to it. It still works fine, and if I ever find my old tape player I'll get those old cassettes out and load my programs back up again.