Man, I wanted an Adam - the TV commercials were pretty convincing. Better still they made it look like it came with EVERYTHING - printer (did that printer even do color like the show in the ad?), separate keyboard (a luxury at the time) - and hey kids, it's actually a secret video game console too! Tell Mom & Dad it's educational! Never even saw one in person, much less had one.
First family computer was a TI-99/4A (featuring ads with Bill Cosby, spokes-rapist)
Actually pretty good for its time, though the software library was a bit limited. I found out years later that it had a 16bit CPU, which explains why it looked pretty good compared to the Atari 8-bit consoles & computers.
Towards the end of its life K-Mart was selling them for $49.99 to get rid of them, and Texas Instruments was still offering a $50 rebate. Not counting postage you actually came out 1 cent ahead in the deal if you were patient.
It was another hybrid computer/game console. Most games came on cartridges and some programs did too. I was like a savant in some of those games as a kid - Munch Man, the TI clone of Pac-Man where you shit out chain-links around the maze rather than eating pellets - at some point I could just play that indefinitely. In retrospect I don't think it was my skill - it was more that they just maxed out the CPU at the higher levels, so if you could master those the computer was literally incapable of running it any faster and making it any harder. It looped back around after level 99 but stayed fast.
It also featured the world's worst joysticks.
The pair was wired together - that wasn't so much a problem, but they were really uncomfortable to use too. As a kid I could even put up with that, but they literally wore out after about 4 hours of gameplay. Luckily you could get an adapter then use any standard 9-pin joystick, which we did after burning through a few sets.
We also had the optional "Speech Synthesizer" pictured above, which was pretty impressive for its time. The best game we had that supported it was Parsec, a side-scrolling space-shooter SHMUP which had a clear female voice that gave updates like "extra ship". It was digitized speech but you could also use it as a real speech synthesizer and have the computer speak anything you typed - though it was a lot less convincing than the digitized speech from games.
The full TI setup looked like this:
With the massive expansion box. Not sure what, if anything, actually went into that box other than the mighty full-height 5.25 floppy drives.
We never had any of that, way too expensive.
Like the Adam, we had tapes. Not a fancy purpose-built tape deck either, no it was one of these bad-boys:
Since it wasn't built specifically for the job, and since audio tapes just suck in general and REALLY REALLY suck as a method to store computer programs, you could spend a solid 15 to 30 minutes trying to load your 16KB program only to have it crap out at the end. Oh, looks like the "tone" wheel was adjusted wrong. How can you tell? You can't. Just have to blindly adjust it again, start the process over and hope for the best.
This was doubly annoying because by far the best game I had for the system was Tunnels of Doom. Tunnels of Doom was an early RPG and it was a hybrid cart/tape game - you had to have both, and I think the cart just added some extra RAM to the system because that one took even longer than average to load from tape. To the point where I developed a ritual - start the loading, go make a sandwich, cut up a pickle, etc. and it would be almost done by the time I had lunch ready.
It was a cool game, randomly generated dungeons like Rogue or Diablo - you could set the number of floors too to determine the length of the game. If you set it to more/harder there were neat bonuses like a gear shop hidden deep down in the dungeon. You could also choose a party of 4 characters or one "hero" class character who was basically all the classes rolled into one. The dungeon exploration was even in 3D (very basic 3D, but still), though the battles were in 2D overhead.
The thing that really amazes me thinking back on this is that my father, who these days asks questions like "How do I delete an email from my gmail?", was able to figure out both how to load programs from tape, and even save and re-load them from tape. He didn't really program anything but we both copied a bunch of programs out of computer magazines and typed them in - tedious as fuck since I couldn't touch-type back then (I was like 5 or 6 when we first got the TI) and he still can't.
