[fred cook]

was a Texas Instruments TI99A. It used a black and white tv for the screen, had no hard drive and only 16k of memory. If you wanted to run a program you had to type in using basic or, having done so previously and saved it to a cassette tape, load it off the tape player. There were some plug in cassettes that allowed the operator to play some simple games (pong for example) and a pair of simple/cheap hand controllers. The first basic program that I wrote to use on it was one that would use surveyor's traverse bearings and distances to calculate the true bearing and distance between two points. I think this was in 1979 or 1980. The most important thing that I learned from having the TI computer was that the typing class I took in High School was going to be important in my life!

Anyway, I'm glad that Wayne saw fit to fire up Pelican Parts so that we would have a place to spend our time and money!