When I was 8 I received a junky old TI computer from relatives from which I taught myself to program BASIC. While talking about old computers I was reminded of it and did a bit of searching and found the wiki entry on it. And looks like it is roughly as old as I am!

Anyway a few years after after getting it the part that hooked up to the TV went bad. I tried to take it to Radio Shack and see if I could get a replacement but apparently the part was too old and couldn't be replaced though the guy there was nice and opened it up and gave a shot at fixing it which did get it running for a bit longer.

While talking about it I joked about finding the part on ebay. But apparently it wasn't much of a joke and I ended up finding it. Only 5$ too though an extra 6 or so for shipping. Being a pack rat I still have the computer and managed to dig it up. I tried to power it up but then realized how hard it'd be to tell if it was actually working without the TV hook up since there are no lights on it and no moving parts inside to hear spin up so it's pretty darn quiet if it is working!

I'm real tempted to just blow the 11-12$ on the video modulator just to see if it works since I actually still have a TV that it can hook up to laying around as well.

Another interesting thing I found when searching on ebay was someone selling the whole computer and received this awesome question
"Q: Can this computer run Office 2007?
A: I don't see any way this computer could run current software, but I'm not a computer guy."