TI BASIC was pretty neat, but you hit brick walls once you did everything you could do with character definition graphics -- unless you could afford the additional cartridges for assembly language or Extended BASIC. And then the seemingly unobtainable expansion hardware if you wanted a modem or floppy drives.
Before family bought anything, I wanted an Apple II-something. We went to the "Apple store" (IIRC, a small utilitarian office/warehouse space for school AV equipment seller, trying to turn into a computer showroom for parents), but when my parents saw the sticker price, IIRC, it was 10x a TI.
In hindsight, a C64 would've been the best choice around the same price point as the TI, but parents couldn't have known that at the time. TI was marketing like crazy, with lots of talk of education software (which we never saw), and the unspeakable celebrity endorsement. There were also a lot of worse choices parents could've made.
Before family bought anything, I wanted an Apple II-something. We went to the "Apple store" (IIRC, a small utilitarian office/warehouse space for school AV equipment seller, trying to turn into a computer showroom for parents), but when my parents saw the sticker price, IIRC, it was 10x a TI.
In hindsight, a C64 would've been the best choice around the same price point as the TI, but parents couldn't have known that at the time. TI was marketing like crazy, with lots of talk of education software (which we never saw), and the unspeakable celebrity endorsement. There were also a lot of worse choices parents could've made.