I had one too. The really shocking bottleneck though was this: just 256 bytes of RAM were CPU-addressable; the 16k bytes it was advertised to come with were vid

I had one too. The really shocking bottleneck though was this: just 256 bytes of RAM were CPU-addressable; the 16k bytes it was advertised to come with were video RAM. If you bought the "mini memory" 4k expansion and coded in assembler, the speed seemed competitive with other home computers around then. Apparently it was coding in BASIC through the video memory bottleneck (and iirc an extra level of interpretation? I think I read somewhere that their BASIC interpreter was written in an interpreted VM code) that made your programs so slow on the TI-99. (Added: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A#VDP_RAM_and_GPL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A#VDP...)