In the early 1990s I got it along a ZX80
The TI was essentially useless with the stock BASIC, it barely allowed you to do primitive text mode graphics. I also compared the speed to my ZX80 and it was many times slower.
Infact if you displayed the whole character set and redefinied characters, you could see the BASIC interpreter moving its data away from the space used by unused user defined characters.It had something like 128 words of RAM accessible to the processor, while its 16 kilobytes were all dedicated to the graphics chip... so every access had to go through the graphics chip. To make it even slower, the BASIC interpreter was itself interpreted.
Some accessories removed some of the problems. For example you could give the CPU some actual RAM apparently, but those things were completely unobtainable back then.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
