The Surprising History of Sprites
&gt; You may not remember the TI-99&#x2F;4, although it was for a brief time the best-selling computer in America,<p>I certainly remember it - the &#x2F;4A was my first computer. My dad thought that 16-bit was the wave of the future, so chose it over the 8-bit machines of the era.<p>I mean, he wasn&#x27;t wrong, per se, but there was so much more available for the Apple 2.<p>I learned &quot;sprite&quot; because of the BASIC manual that came with the machine. I didn&#x27;t realize the term originated with Texas Instruments.<p>I was surprised about &quot;Danny Hillis, while working for Texas Instruments in the late 1970s&quot; as I didn&#x27;t realize he worked for TI.<p>While the Wikipedia entry says &quot;It was also used by Danny Hillis at Texas Instruments in the late 1970s&quot;, it doesn&#x27;t Danny Hillis doesn&#x27;t appear to have been employed by TI.<p>From what I could tell, he was working at MIT, for Seymour Papert, on a TI sponsored project.<p>I added the discussion section &quot;Hillis and TI&quot; to the relevant Wikipedia page at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Talk:Sprite_(computer_graphics)#Hillis_and_TI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Talk:Sprite_(computer_graphics...</a> .<p>BTW, making games in TI BASIC with sprites was very easy. My most advanced was a Moon Lander clone. I used a sprite for the lander, hand-created shapes for each rotation, and with a flat ground I was soon done. .. though there was some jerkiness problem in how I handled sprite velocity updates, which I needed help to resolve.