Well sort of anyway…
Who had a C64 back in the day when a game of pong meant programming by hand froma magazine?
Sorry about that…
As I mentioned, the Timex/Sinclare would crash. I may have had a bad one, but the TI99 served me well for quite some time.
I actually started with a Timex/Sinclare, but shifted to TI99-4a when I started. All that was without the benefit of the online community.
My first Commodore was the SX-64 which was a lug-able computer. I bought it with a modem that connected to the game port, and was soon dialing into places like GEnie, The Source, and CompuServe.
I got rid of the Timex due to it crashing while I was entering code from a magazine. If I ever finished a program, I had to save it to a cassette tape.
My father gave us one when I was, what, 12 maybe… loooong time ago 
And it had 64K of memory, infinitely more then the VIC, and more than anyone would ever need… 
I had a VIC20 from Comodore. It had 4 KB internal memory.
Yes, we are getting old.
Why shift to T199? I found my Timex/Sinclare works very well for me until this recent times…Anyways,we people have different needs… good you have found the best one for you.
It looks like a very noisy keyboard but its classic!