[hn_acc1]

Same here - parents bought one for me in 1982, IIRC. By 1984 I had moved to Atari XL, but I'll always have a soft spot for the TI-99/4A, Extended Basic cartridge, speech synthesizer, cassette drive, etc.

My sister and I used to co-type programs from "Compute!". The times were so much simpler then..

[icedchai]

The TI99/4A was my first computer when I was 7 or 8. Unfortunately, no cassette drive. As soon as I shut it off, my basic program was gone!

[raddan]

The TI99/4A was also my first computer. I was about 5, and I didn’t really seriously try writing programs until I was about 8. Fortunately, since my father bought this for work, we had a large collection of peripherals, including the floppy disk drive. Unfortunately I learned the hard way why my father stopped using it: peripheral expansion bus devices were exquisitely sensitive to static shocks. I remember reeling in horror after watching hours of work just disappear from the disk drive. I suppose this was probably a good lesson to learn at an early age!