Adventure on Black Friday
Not long after the 70′s were surrendered to the history books, I was anxious to get my hands on a personal computer. My appetite was whetted several years earlier by the introduction of Radio Shack’s TRS-80, Commodore’s PET, and the Apple II, none of which I could afford. I was especially keen on the TRS-80 since it was expertly marketed through Tandy’s Radio Shack stores and easily accessible for the public to see and touch. Unfortunately, the next wave of personal computer offerings would be more robustly featured and naturally a bit more pricey.
In late 1981, Texas Instruments’s plan was to swamp the marketplace with the TI-99/2. It was a low-end alternative to their highly successful, but pricey, TI-99/4 home computer system which, introduced in 1979, was still going strong. 
Their plan was preempted by the likes of Atari and Commodore, who each released basic systems at a comparable price point. Even their spokesman Bill Cosby couldn’t help TI overcome that kind of competition. As a result, the limited number of TI-99/2 computers already built were picked up Sears, and advertised at well under $100 each to draw shoppers to their stores on black Friday 1982.
So there I was, at 6:20am waiting outside a Sears on the morning after Thanksgiving, behind about 8 or 10 other early bird shoppers. I sized up my potential rivals, and thought to myself that most, if not all of these people, were unlikely to be waiting to buy a computer. 
The TI-99/2 was simply a keyboard with built-in processor and a meager amount of RAM. It required a TV set to display its black & white text only output, and a cassette recorder to save your programs and data. There were no prepackaged games or programs developed for it since TI had already scrapped the future of this model. Each store only had a dozen or so units, and I was concerned that they might sell within the first hour, which is why I decided to get there early.
As a store clerk arrived to open the door upon some sort of official signal, the intensity given off by my fellow shoppers seemed comparable to that of a bucking chute at the start of a bull ride. The gathering had grown to about 30 coyly truculent shoppers, mostly women. I intended to be polite, but assertive if necessary. At precisely 7:00am, the doors were unlocked and I found myself sucked into the human rapids of crazed bargain hunters. I stepped out of the flow to ask a dazed store clerk where I would find the computer that was advertised. 
She pointed down a wide perpendicular aisle. I trotted in that direction, more comfortable that the majority of the mob was after other pre-Christmas discounts. I soon spotted the stack of TI-99′s at the end of the aisle, and as I moved closer, witnessed the pile shrinking with each stride. I immediately broke into a flat-out sprint – stunned, that the boxes were being whisked from the shelf. If you’ve ever had something seemingly unfold in slow motion, it’s amazing how your mind can cover an awful lot of thoughtful ground in a fraction of a second. It dawned on my as my hopes to get one of these computers was but a flicker, that there were several other doors from which shoppers could enter the store.
Two of us arrived together from opposite directions, eying the last two TI-99′s. Knowing that one would be mine, I was able to demonstrate a polite gesture to the woman who held the other end of the top box. She smirked as if to claim victory over me, but it didn’t matter, since I did indeed get one,.. the last one. This sort of “when the doors open” shopping is a competitive venture that I’ve since chosen to avoid.