[vparikh]

My uncle bought a TI-99/4A when Texas Instruments were blowing them out for $49 around the summer of 1987 or so. Played Parsec with the voice module and that was it - I was hooked. I needed to figure out how it did this. Started with the BASIC programming books that came with the machine.

Begged my parents until they bought me a Commodore 64 with a 1541 drive. I go a subscription to Compute's Gazette and typed in programs and figured out how they worked. Graduated to Richard Mansfield's Machine Learning for Beginners (https://archive.org/details/Compute_s_Machine_Language_for_B...) and I was on my way. And poured over the 'Antatomy of the Commodore 64' which had a dump of the annotated ROM firmware and poured over it to learn the machine inside and out (https://archive.org/details/The_Anatomy_of_the_Commodore_64/...)

And finally - dove into 'The Kracker Jax Revealed Books 1, 2, 3' (https://www.lyonlabs.org/commodore/onrequest/the_kracker_jax...) to learn all the protection schemes and how they were implemented to work around them. This taught me all of the tricks of disk access/memory compression, encryption and obfuscation. This really showed me a lot of how low level coding to control micro controllers/memory access/hardware level coding etc.

I had about four friends in school from 4th grade to high school graduation that had 64s and we would spend lunch and recess discussing what we learned/hacked/discovered the night before. Sure we were outcasts - but then we were so obsessed within our little world we could care less about the petty teenage drama around us.

Good times. I miss those days. I look at kids today and feel kind of sad that they lack the opportunity and/or the patience to do anything like that.

[Gormo]

TI's price war with Commodore went into high gear in 1983, and TI pulled out of the market in '84. So your early experiences with the TI-99/4A were probably a bit earlier than you remember.

I had a similar story -- my grandfather grabbed one for $50 at, IIRC, JC Penney and gave it to me for my 4th birthday in 1983. Got my start with TI-BASIC as a young kid, then GW-BASIC on an XT clone a few years later. Then came Scheme, Pascal, C, C++, Java, Python, PHP, JavaScript...

[vparikh]

Yes - you are completely right. I just looked up my receipt for my C64 and it was Dec. of 1984. Still have it all! So long ago, yet seems like yesterday :)