I for one wouldn't complain if you went into the weeds about RAM disks. My familiarity today with Microsoft architecture, so stubbornly set that it hinders me from learning shit like Linux, starts with my dad showing me how to set up a RAM disk in DOS forty years ago. We had an 8086 IBM compatible, and before getting a hard drive a RAM disk was the fast way to switch between several games that came on one floppy.
The 99/4A as released can only recognize a maximum of 48K RAM, and has 16K onboard. People made 256K and 512K RAMdisk cards with battery backup and put all their most used utilities, works in progress, fast access files, etc on them. It was especially useful since there was no built-in CATALOG command or any other simple DOS functions in BASIC. Saving, rebooting, and loading a disk manager to see what was on a floppy was dumb enough, but it was much less painful with the DM software on RAMdisk.
Now there's a 1 megabyte memory expansion for program memory and I'm not really sure how it works at all, but it got the TI's best game coder to finish an RPG he'd given up on twenty years before.
I for one wouldn't complain if you went into the weeds about RAM disks. My familiarity today with Microsoft architecture, so stubbornly set that it hinders me from learning shit like Linux, starts with my dad showing me how to set up a RAM disk in DOS forty years ago. We had an 8086 IBM compatible, and before getting a hard drive a RAM disk was the fast way to switch between several games that came on one floppy.
The 99/4A as released can only recognize a maximum of 48K RAM, and has 16K onboard. People made 256K and 512K RAMdisk cards with battery backup and put all their most used utilities, works in progress, fast access files, etc on them. It was especially useful since there was no built-in CATALOG command or any other simple DOS functions in BASIC. Saving, rebooting, and loading a disk manager to see what was on a floppy was dumb enough, but it was much less painful with the DM software on RAMdisk.
Now there's a 1 megabyte memory expansion for program memory and I'm not really sure how it works at all, but it got the TI's best game coder to finish an RPG he'd given up on twenty years before.