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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

The TI-99/4A joystick port fit an actual D-sub connector.

As a child, I made a kind of breakout box for the joystick port, using a standard connector, project box, and screw terminal strips. For very simple interfacing with normally-open switches. (Arduinos and RasPis are much better.) First applications were to build a burglar alarm, and grade school computer voting station.

(This was pre-Internet, and pre-modem, and no docs to speak of. Somehow, I didn't break the family home computer, despite blindly shorting unknown pins, and with no knowledge beyond what I could understand of the Forrest Mims intro electronics book.)

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The port is a modified Atari port - they wanted to sell you their own joysticks, and save on a port, so they came wired together into one port. I had a Y-adapter that let you use standard joysticks.

The 99/4 architecture was quite locked down, so I'm surprised that you implemented the burglar/voting applications over/with it.

I think the BBC Micro was the most powerful platform of this class, but the C64 was the most popular in the U.S.

I wish that TI had stayed out of the home computer market. The 9918(a) video chip was really the only real advantage for it. Their mismanagement took other players down with them.

TI BASIC was pretty neat, but you hit brick walls once you did everything you could do with character definition graphics -- unless you could afford the additional cartridges for assembly language or Extended BASIC. And then the seemingly unobtainable expansion hardware if you wanted a modem or floppy drives.

Before family bought anything, I wanted an Apple II-something. We went to the "Apple store" (IIRC, a small utilitarian office/warehouse space for school AV equipment seller, trying to turn into a computer showroom for parents), but when my parents saw the sticker price, IIRC, it was 10x a TI.

In hindsight, a C64 would've been the best choice around the same price point as the TI, but parents couldn't have known that at the time. TI was marketing like crazy, with lots of talk of education software (which we never saw), and the unspeakable celebrity endorsement. There were also a lot of worse choices parents could've made.

I had both 99/4a and later the C64. The C64 was just much more open, a much better computer to learn on.

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