TI built a ton of them and closed them out at fire-sale prices, and they mostly went into people's closets. It was hard to do much with a base model but play its not-so-great cartridge games so it has few fans.

The fanatics though - there's really cool stuff people do. I think you could cheaply upgrade the memory to 16-bit wide, for example.

I spent a lot of time playing parsec and munch-man (yes a pac-man clone, but unique in its own way)

Tunnels of Doom was probably my first exposure to Dungeons & Dragons. I woulda played that every day if it didn't require loading from audio tape via a cassette player (a process that was very prone to errors).

The TI is a 16-bit computer. Indeed, that was the deciding factor to get my Dad to buy a TI for the family.

Ah, yes, right. Though with a 16 bit memory bus, like the 8-bit machines it competed with, and only 16kb memory.