In 1981, I was 15 years old, the second generation of the Texas Instruments computer the TI-99/4 (the TI-99/4A) was released and BASIC was already 17 years old.
Somehow, my parents managed to scrape together enough money to purchase the TI-99/4A for their three sons to share. It wasn’t the fully optioned out model with the voice synthesis and tape drive (although a Radio Shack tape drive was added later). However, when that glorious machine was unboxed and hooked up to our Zenith TV with the curved glass and 4:3 ratio it blew my mind. It truly was a life changing moment.
This was not my first experience with a device that could take input from me and transmit it to the television. There was the clicky mechanical remote that barely worked, a friend had the Hamlin sliding cable box, and I had many hours with the Atari 2600. This was different. The TI-99/4A with its included BASIC programming manual opened up a whole new world and one that I never really walked away from.
For the first time, I didn’t have to just select from a list of channels on the cable slider or an Atari 2600 game from the Converse shoe box. It was now possible to write my own programs with the BASIC programming language. I loved it enough that more than once while trying to write programs late into the night, my parents had to come down into the dark basement, turn off the Zenith and send me off to bed.
Years later, the inspiration from the TI-99/4A and BASIC would lead me to Pascal, COBOL, HTML, PHP and SQL. It was that Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code that led me to right here where I am today.
So, Thanks BASIC and:
10 CALL CLEAR
20 LET A$=”HAPPY 50TH”
30 LET B$=”BIRTHDAY”
40 LET C$=”BASIC”
50 PRINT TAB(13);A$:::TAB(12);B4:::TAB(13);C$;”!”
60 FORZ=1 TO 10
70 PRINT
80 NEXT Z
90 FOR Z=1 TO 600
100 NEXT Z
110 GO TO 10