Things that if someone said to you in 1990 about the TI in the future you would NOT have believed.

[Omega-TI]

I'll start it off with a few...

 

1) You'll still be using a TI-99/4A in 2020...

2) In 2020 everything in your P-Box will fit in a speech synthesizer sized sidecar...

3) You'll have gigabytes of storage for your TI-99/4A, and more than you can ever hope to use, all in a storage device the size of your thumbnail...

 

Now you can add your own...

 

 

[jrhodes]

"You know that game Dragons Lair? You'll be able to play it on your TI-99/4A"

[+pixelpedant]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: there is a port of Dragon's Lair for unexpanded TI-99/4A which surpasses the 1989 Macintosh, PC and Amiga versions in visual accuracy and completeness.

 

[+pixelpedant]

On that note, I found this comment from TI*MES Summer 1983 on Astron Belt (the first Laserdisc arcade game, before Dragon's Lair) amusing:

 

 

Unlikely to ever appear on home computer you say?  Well do I have news for you!

[digdugnate]

my general statement would be 'there's going to be a dedicated community devoted to the 994A and creating new peripherals thirty years from now'.

[DavidC]

This computer will be digitized and emulated.  Virtually. 

[HOME AUTOMATION]

On 5/20/2020 at 7:01 PM, digdugnate said:

my general statement would be 'there's going to be a dedicated community devoted to the 994A and creating new peripherals thirty years from now'.

I imagine, @BuckoBrand and @iliketurtles may have a say in that...

[+pixelpedant]

I feel like the one completely crazy thing about the TI-99 community in 2020 that is perfectly believable from the standpoint of 1990 is that it would still be around and people would still be making hardware and software. 

 

I mean, it's not like 1981-1990 was all sunshine and rainbows, with TI lavishing endless good news on user groups, and the platform increasingly dominating the consumer computer market. 

 

If you survived 1981-1990 as a 99er, I figure you can survive anything.  If you still had a TI-99 hooked up when you also had an Amiga or a 486 in the other room, I don't see why you shouldn't still have one today. 

[Omega-TI]

In 1990 I got out of the TI and bought a PC.  At that time I was the only remaining TI'er left in town and things got rather lonely in those pre-Internet days.  The TI had been abandoned by Texas Instruments for about 6 or 7 years by then and even with third-party hardware attached there was really little I could do with it compared to the new computers coming out. 

 

At the time PC's were getting faster, more memory and improving video displays.  It seemed like every 18 months capacities and speed were doubling.  And then there was the software... I was too limited with the TI, so could not justify keeping it any longer... I was still using it as my main machine back then.  So with all this in mind, for me, AT THAT TIME I would never imagined that I would buy another TI twenty-two years later.  SD cards and WiFi did not even exist back then and I never imagined people would be making really cool stuff for it thirty years later.  I guess I was not as imaginative or as forward thinking back then. 

 

Now the past eight years have been a wild ride!  With the TIPI, F18A and FinalGROM it's like a whole new machine!

[Tursi]

On 5/22/2020 at 12:02 PM, pixelpedant said:

If you survived 1981-1990 as a 99er, I figure you can survive anything.  If you still had a TI-99 hooked up when you also had an Amiga or a 486 in the other room, I don't see why you shouldn't still have one today. 

Heh. By 1990 the only other machine I had was an Apple 2+, which was not my main machine (only 64k, so it couldn't run all the software).  TI didn't stop being my primary machine till '92 or so, replaced somewhat by an Atari ST then finally an Amiga 2000. I gave up on the orphans and went PC in '95.

 

The only things above that I probably would have scoffed at would be the gigabytes of storage (I remember doing the math in the 80s for video storage on the TI, but even then the concept of gigabytes seemed ludicrous) and Dragon's Lair. But the latter is more because the games we had really undersold what the machine could do (as we are learning now).. and of course the amount of memory it would ultimately take was unheard of back then. Even on the audio side of things, I remember being so jealous of my friend's Atari ST sound chip, and now working on audio converters I have realized just how close the TI sound chip actually was. There are only a handful of sounds it can produce that we can't.

 

But that's how history works, I guess, and why "what might have been" is so much fun.

 

The only other thing would be raster effect demos. That literally blew me away when I saw it in "Don't Mess With Texas", and I still don't think it should work, but there it is! 

 

[Omega-TI]

Oh yeah!  I still remember the price of memory and memory storage back in the 90's!  It was so bad people were using compression programs right and left.  The very thought of gigabytes, let alone terabytes, would have been ludicrous for the average consumer to even contemplate.  

[JB]

"Hey, you guys in 1990. In the year 2020, you will be talking about this machine on the internet with people all over the worl- what's an internet? It is kinda like a BBS only- no, the long distance costs won't kill it because- look, it doesn't work like th- no, we don't have flying cars in the future!"

Edited May 23, 2020 by JB

[jedimatt42]

 $1600     1024MB     $819,200
------- X -------- = ----------
 2MB        1GB         1GB

 

"In 2016, you will spend nearly a million dollars per gigabyte for 1980s memory, but a gigbyte of contemporary ram will only cost $25"

(That was for my Geneve) 

 

(Something more common like a 16k TI-99/4A)

 $50      1024K     1024M     $3,276,800
------ X ------- X ------- = -------------
 16k       1M        1G          1G

 

I find this astonishing... is my math correct? 

 

[+J-Data]

My quote would be “You’ll have a 400 meg modem”. At the time I had a 300 baud modem (still do).

 

Hard to believe the average laptop has a million time the memory of the 4A (literally).  Heck, a $5 raspberry pi zero has 30,000 times the memory of the TI.   

[Tursi]

4 hours ago, J-Data said:

My quote would be “You’ll have a 400 meg modem”. At the time I had a 300 baud modem (still do).

Nahhhh, according to the Comdex 2000 text file that was floating around back then, we were supposed to have faster-than-light modems 20 years ago!

 

[JB]

30 minutes ago, Tursi said:

Nahhhh, according to the Comdex 2000 text file that was floating around back then, we were supposed to have faster-than-light modems 20 years ago!

 

My fiber-optic modem moves data at the speed of light, but I dunno about faster than light.

[Tursi]

Here's the old text file, from sometime in the 80s. It's kind of fun to look back, remember thinking it was fanciful, and yet it was so wrong by the time 2000 really came around. Except maybe the Legaldex bit... 

 

Comdex 1999.txt