I may be opening myself up to some major criticism, for simply asking, "Why?"

[- Ω -]

I'm no expert or fortune teller, sadly just a slowly fading super-fan of the TI-99/4A, which appears (in my personal assessment) to have "peaked".  Years ago there were hundreds of messages a month in places like the old Yahoo site and then AA.  Some very happy, helpful and influential people have passed away though, others were driven off for various reasons which may have affected the fun factor and contributed to the declining participation rate.  Along the way there was a fantastic Newsletter by a guy called "Sparkdrummer" that was called Yesterday's News" in it he covered the best of the best from older newsletters in a format that matched the Newsletters of the time.  I'm sure many of us are waiting for the day when Sparky starts uploading them again. 

Now there is a recently "reborn newsletter", but I caught myself asking, "Why"?   Yeah, I shocked myself too!  << THIS LINK >> will get you a free PDF copy of it, but after looking it over, for the rebirth issue, wondered what it had going for it that 5 minutes with a search engine on the Internet could not have provided.  I really hope this takes off for them and they get the new content they want and viewers and readers they want, because the TI community needs to be more diverse and inclusive, even of newbies or those who are not master programmers or hardware gurus or those that simply want to play games.

DON'T PUT ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET!  If an online community is declining, there may be a reason for it other than beloved members passing away, or people being banned, other things may be going on behind the scenes, attitudes, egos or whatever.  So, I hope this Chicago Times Newsletter takes off and brings more people to their website and can help inspire people to engage or reengage.  Whatever though, don't let people influence you to "stay put" and not investigate new things, especially if their format is no longer working.  Sometimes new faces and new ideas can start a whole new chapter... maybe that person will be YOU!

[John Behnke]

Please forgive my late response to this post as I have just recently found it.

My name is John Behnke and at one time, decades ago, I was a part of the Chicago Users Group. I was very young back then and after getting a full time job, getting married and having kids, I moved on to the world of the PC and did not look back. About a year ago I reengaged with the group and after having retired and having free time, I offered to restart our long dormant newsletter as well as redo the group web page. It saddened me that so many fine people in the community had passed or moved on but such is life.

The reason for this reply is that I wanted to add a few thoughts of mine and explain why the Chicago Group gave me permission and what my motivation was in restarting the newsletter.

 

First off I would like to address the comment about the early issues having nothing but web content and reprinted old articles. While this is mostly true, I had to start from somewhere and not having sources of new content available, I had to put in more "nostalgia" that I would have liked. I added articles from myself as much as I dared but tried to limit this as this was not supposed to be a "John Behnke Newsletter" nor did I want to give the impression that this was some kind of ego thing all about me.

I think you will find as the months go on, there will be more new content. I have reached out to what is left of the TI Community requesting new articles, programs and anything that might be of interest to the community. Aside from mentioning the next meeting and some discussion of the next TI Faire, we intend the content to be of interest to the entire TI community and not just a Chicago User Group publication. So far I have received a few contributions and they will be published in the April and May Editions. I hope to have more.

 

I would like to thank you for this post and hope you continue to read our newsletter. While it will contain more rehash than I would like, as you suggest in your post, this reborn newsletter will prosper or die depending on the TI community. Retro gaming is all the rage and I would love if the reintroduction of this newsletter, dormant for 18 years, might spark others in rekindling the fire we all once had so many years ago!

 

Once again thanks for your kind words and encouragement!

[John Behnke]

The April Edition is out for download at ChicagoTIUG.org

 

I hope it's getting better. I'll keep asking people for contributions but I have to be honest, few people seem to want to write even a short article. I'll keep trying.

[RickR]

John, I'm going to create a new thread for your newsletter and club.  I think it's great and I just started reading your first newsletter today.  I hope we can help you drum up more interest.

 

[John Behnke]

Thanks Rick! This is very kind of you.

[Atari 5200 Guy]

A bit of advice: Even if you attract a small group don't give up. Keep it going. Sometimes it takes a while for something dedicated to a single product to shine and be discovered by newcomers. 

SPACE (the only Atari computer club left in America that I'm aware of) is still going and has a small group of people still a part of it. Even if it is a handful of people it's still hanging on. So don't give up.

The newsletter looks nice and is full of information. I'm not a huge fan of the TI myself but I do have one with 3 games. I barely use it but it is a neat computer. Your newsletter brought a bit of insight to the system as a whole. But, my goodness, that thing gets long with add-ons! I think I'll stick with just the computer 😉. 

Learning how to program it would be of interest to me as mine didn't come with any books of any kind. I know these can most likely be found online but reading it through a newsletter really brings out the nostalgia for me.

[John Behnke]

Well truth be told, those add-ons were consolidated into the PBox (think an oversized bread box) that kinda sorta helped but was still huge nonetheless. Now we seem to judge size my today's standards LOL so everything back then looked huge. I actually was going to buy an Atari 400 (all I could afford) but TI's real keyboard and cheaper price won me out. Now I don't remember if the Atari had expansion devices but if they did add memory expansion, Disk Drives, Modems etc... how did they manage space wise?

 

They do have console only devices now for the TI that adds SD storage instead of that huge box. I'm looking into getting one of those as I don't have the space even for a PBox.

Thank you for your encouragement and kind words BTW!

[RickR]

1 hour ago, John Behnke said:

Now I don't remember if the Atari had expansion devices but if they did add memory expansion, Disk Drives, Modems etc... how did they manage space wise?

Atari used a simple cable for external devices (it is called an SIO cable) and you daisy chain them together.  So you can stack or put them wherever you wish.  Most devices had two SIO ports on the back...one to connect to the computer and one to connect the next device. 

Commodore was similar, but they also had a separate port for tape drives. 

I agree with your assessment that the PBox for TI is way too big for modern usage.  Plus it is easily replaceable with modern SD cart solutions. 

Although I have a few small tube TV's, I much prefer to use analog LCD for these old computers.  I think they produce really sharp images, and they take up MUCH less space. 

[Justin]

1 hour ago, RickR said:

Atari used a simple cable for external devices (it is called an SIO cable) and you daisy chain them together.

Big influence on USB, that’s a fun story if you read into it. I like to credit Atari for the USB 😛

[RickR]

19 minutes ago, Justin said:

Big influence on USB, that’s a fun story if you read into it. I like to credit Atari for the USB 😛

Yep!  I like to say the Atari 8-bit computers were very elegant in their design.

[Atari 5200 Guy]

9 hours ago, Justin said:

Big influence on USB, that’s a fun story if you read into it. I like to credit Atari for the USB 😛

The creator of Atari's SIO interface is the same person who came up with USB. I would say both interfaces were probably related in some way. 

SIO is an interesting interface. You can power any 5-volt device with it if you need to. Disk drives could be stacked on one another and placed somewhere else as long as the SIO cable was long enough to reach it. You could have up to 4 disk drives, a printer, modem, and a program recorder. There was no speech expansion I'm aware of because POKEY could do it with some genius software programming. 

The 5200 also has an SIO port but it's in the form of an expansion bus.

[John Behnke]

I sure wish TI had thought of something similar. I love the TI but I had nightmares of bumping my desk and having the long black PBox cable disconnect.

 

Well the TI had a better keyboard than the 400 so there! LOL

[- Ω -]

On 4/7/2024 at 10:43 PM, John Behnke said:

I sure wish TI had thought of something similar. I love the TI but I had nightmares of bumping my desk and having the long black PBox cable disconnect.

Try this!  It's a nice tight fit and if you do bump it, the cable is much more flexible (out the back).  

 

 

[John Behnke]

Well once I get the console up and running I have a few years left of 3rd party hardware to look at. Hopefully some of it is still being produced. Thanks for the suggestions.