There was a recent post on the Two Bit History blog imagining what it might have been like to learn to program as a kid in 1983. I was there and did this myself, but my experience was a little different than the author's imagined experience.

The author imagines seeing TV ads for the Commodore 64 and persuading his parents (presumably "his," given the "computers weren't for her" parenthetical reference) to buy one, to save him from the arcades and to give his father the chance to try a spreadsheet.

In my case I had already been saved from the arcades, if such a thing was possible, the previous year, when my parents bet wrong on the Magnavox Odyssey² video game console, indoctrinating me and my brothers into Ed Averett's particular personal brand of video game design (single lives and programmable levels). I remember playing with Atari computers in a department store (JC Penney? Sears?), but don't remember TV ads for computers. War Games and Whiz Kids might have been media models for computer-using kids, but they were both still a few months in the future.

I think the actual trigger for my exposure to computers was the home computer price war of 1983. In April, 1983, the price of the Texas Instruments 99/4A console itself had been dragged down below $200, and TI had extended its "Free Speech" offer of a free speech synthesizer module through April 15. In quick succession my parents and two pairs of my aunts and uncles all decided the price was too good to pass up and bought TI computers.

What practical good was it? Who knew? Word processing and spreadsheets and telecommunications all still required the unfathomably expensive Peripheral Expansion Box. What you could do with the base system was mostly to type in your own programs and save them on cassette tape.

The author's account of trying to figure out how to hook the computer up to the TV rings true. In our case, the great uncertainty was whether it was OK to daisy-chain the video modulators for the Odyssey² and the TI-99/4A together, or whether only one device could be safely attached at a time, since neither system's manual considered the possibility of sharing the TV set with any other device. In the end, it was perfectly reasonable to hook them both up at once as long as they weren't both turned on at once and fighting over the same TV channel.

The Two Bit History author's experience starts with changing colors using special keyboard functions before moving onto BASIC. The TI-99/4A didn't have any of that. But it had a set of color bars on the startup screen, so you could do the same TV adjustments from that as the Commodore manual encourages you to do by typing spaces in various colors.

In my memory, it is my mother who sat down with me to work through the Beginner's BASIC book that came with the computer. She had learned some Fortran in college, although I don't think she had used a computer since then.

Would we have paid any attention to the references to ANSI Minimal BASIC or the original Dartmouth BASIC in the first few pages of the book? Probably not. But it is worth noting that TI BASIC was not Microsoft BASIC, and access to hardware functions was through a defined API rather than through either special keyboard functions or PEEKs and POKEs.

Like the Two Bit History author, my first exposure would have been to PRINT in immediate mode. Instead of having to find the quotation marks as SHIFT+2, I would have found it on FCTN+P, unlike any other keyboard. I must have been acquainted with the QWERTY keyboard arrangement already from the Odyssey², but I probably had no expectations going in about what punctuation would be available or how to type it. The TI's "hello world" was apparently "HI THERE!"