I had a Texas Instruments TI 99-4/A. It was a horrible base computer but if you bought the "Breadbox" expansion unit it got better. You could add 32K more RAM and whatever other cards it used. Programs came on ROM cartridges that slid into it, and the fatal flaw was that after a while that card receptor slot became worn and the carts were not able to seat tightly. As anything with friction/tension based connections will.

That expansion box was something else. It connected with a big flat cable about 4 inches wide terminating into a 3/4" thick connector. It ran some proprietary version of BASIC, with a cart for Extended BASIC. It was truly awful.

I had the idea that if I bought a disc controller card and decided that if I could get the terminating resistors right I would have the only TI around with hard drives. It took me 4 cards, at $139 each, before I got it right but I finally got it to work, and I ended up with 2 720k DSDD 5 1/2" drives in it. I was the envy of the local TI user group. until another guy named Jim managed to code a BBS, which I got a copy of and ran. Pretty slick stuff for 1989!!

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I am using the new 1040XTRAEZ form this year. It has just 2 lines.

1. How much did you make in 2023?
2. Send it to us.