Comments by "" (@ronjon7942) on "Texas Instruments Made a Computer (& It Failed)" video.

  1. Always thought the 994/A and the TRS-80 (especially with the Radio Shack comic) were really modern and sleek looking. I was in awe with these silver colored, high tech mysterious machines and wanted one as a ten or twelve year old kid. And if these sleek machines were mysterious, the IBM PC was this magical high end supercomputer for some ethereal business reason. And IBM was this giant of a company even my parents had some odd, big company reverence for - probably their body language alone made me perceive a PC would be forever out of my reach. But I didn’t actually think that much about because I was focused on the TRS-80 and its myriad of sleek peripherals, but also thought the TI99 looked cool too. And I thought the ‘Texas Instruments’ name sounded high tech. I had several TI calculators, and was dazzled by all the weird mathematical keys. I subconsciously believed TI made the best and most accurate calculators to the odd point where if I had addd two numbers together on some ‘off brand’ calculator, I’d have to do the maths on a TI just to make sure it was correct! Silly, but hey; I was twelve. Soooo I knew my parents got me a computer for Christmas, because there was this big heavy box wrapped in newspaper under the tree. Come Christmas Eve with Mom, Dad, and two older sisters, it’s finally my turn to open a “big” present!!” I tear open the box to find 😮 … A log. What a buzz kill letdown. Who does that to a kid. Christmas sucked. I tried to keep an appreciative attitude, but that pretty much ruined it for me. The next day - Christmas Day - I did get a computer, but I wasn’t excited about it now. It was a Commodore 64, which I thought was pretty cool bc of all the ads I saw about it showing it off connected to a bunch of peripherals, but the stubby, dark brown keyboard computer looked out of proportion to me, and it didn’t have that silver high tech, modern sleekness that caught my heart. Kinda like wanting to go to prom with hot Mary Jane, but getting stuck with an ugly betty. Later when the 128 came out, that really was eye catching but still forever out of my reach. So I was meh about C64. Plus the log trauma was there - laf, apparently still is. So I never got into the Commodore because it was an ugly betty. Same with the Apple products like the Apple II. I didn’t like the color and didn’t think it looked very high tech - not like the shiny TI99 and TRS-80. I did think word processing with Script64 was cool, but I couldn’t get interested in programming on it. I think I must have thought it wasn’t a “real” computer, since it wasn’t large and didn’t have all those big electronic things on it that a computer needed to be a real computer. And inwardly didn’t trust or feel like the cryptic stuff on the display and in the programming books could be what I thought was real programming. So learning how to program just didn’t ignite. I think things would have been much different had I gotten a TI99 or the TRS-80. Ok, thanks for listening. Carry on.
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  2. 24:35 “Concentrate on consumer electronics…data terminals…electronic watches.” Watches? That’s stupid, like who’s going to want a calculator on their wrist? Such a nerd idea. Hold on, Prime truck’s here, could be my new Apple Watch!! So 🆒!!! 😎
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  3. No. She failed.
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