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Cassettes vs. floppy disks
03/21/2021, 19:29:20

    Eric B writes:

    I'd forgotten about those magazines with program scripts. We had a TI 99/4A in our house, and my parents subscribed to a magazine called Compute! (Or was it Compute! Gazette? I can't remember; it's been entirely too long ago now!) Anyway, my mom would spend HOURS inputting the programs from these magazines into TI Extended BASIC (Which was on its own cartridge, as opposed to simple BASIC, which you didn't need anything special to run.) And, of course, the frustration when something didn't quite work, and she'd get an error thanks to either a typo, or something in the actual command that the machine couldn't do, causing her to have to play with the numbers, in an effort to get it to work.

    Or, the disappointment when you'd finally type RUN, only to discover that the game really wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

    I also remember the cassettes. The sound that the computer would put on the tape (Yes, it was audible, and was sort of/kind of similar to the sounds from a dialup modem, which came started to use about a sesquidecade later.) Anyway, I remember when we upgraded to 5¼" floppy disks, how fast they were! Oh, and you also had to have the tape recorder's volume turned up so that the computer could hear the sound. Otherwise, forget it!

    By the way...about my earlier comment about not being into D&D-type games as a child. I take that back. There was ONE on the TI that I enjoyed -- Tunnels Of Doom. They had quite a few third-party games available on that platform (On floppy disk.) Pretty much, the dungeons and game play were all the same, but the premise, monsters, items, party member(s), and quest items differed from game to game. My favorite from that platform was "Daring Adventures In KMart."

    One more thought. Infocom games came on floppy disks, but I remember those would take FOREVER to load. Probably about as long as Scott Adams' Adventure games did on cassette, if not longer.





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