Typing on the TI-99 4A

Typing on the TI-99 4A Around the third or fourth grade, someone in my family got me a book on video game programming for the TI-99 4A. This book probably made the most significant contribution to my interests in computer science. It contained the source code for the video games, but it required you to manually type it in, as there wasn't a concept of "installing" software on the TI. Either the software came on a cartridge or you had to type it in manually. I would two-finger type line after line of code for hours on end. I have to thank my older cousins for taking turns helping me type code on those evenings. There was this one video game's code in particular that took us many, many hours to type in. The video game involved flying, where you're navigating a fighter-style spaceship through explosive mines and other things that are bad for a spaceship to fly into in space. You could fly at a constant speed in only one direction. All you could do was arrow up or arrow down to avoid destruction. It so ruled. Just thinking back on those days makes me look at Visual Studio in a much different light. We used a cassette tape deck to store the video games, until it caught on fire one night. Also, we didn't know whether we typed in a letter wrong until the very end of the our typing ordeal, when we got to finally compile. Think of typing on the TI as using Notepad to type hours upon hours of source code from a book, without the ability to save, until the end. Maybe this is why I "heart" Visual Studio so much. One of the lessons we learned the hard way was that you lost everything if you turned off the computer or if there was a power failure (which of course happened one night). How we were able to ever program that game is beyond me, and we did it on several occasions (as we didn't realize we had to save to cassette the first time). I definitely learned patience, although the adults probably beg to differ, and how to pay attention to detail from all that typing.