Ages and ages ago (I am old) I grew up on a steady diet of reruns of Fat Albert cartoons. This was my introduction to Bill Cosby. Actually, it was pretty much all I knew about Bill Cosby at the time besides his commercials for Coke or Jell-O.

Saturday mornings were a time where this strange Cosby man would sit in a junkyard and come at me with music and fun. Always warning me that if I wasn’t careful I might learn something. Hey hey hey! “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I would complain in my head, “just get to the cartoon part.”

The other cartoons on TV at the time were mostly Wile E. Coyote’s violent exploits in his attempts at bird murder. Lessons could be gleaned there if one paid close attention. For example: “don’t trust mail order catalogs.” However, every week, and even several times in each episode, Wile E. would return and thus negate any possible lessons.

Fat Albert about to use the Staff of Ra to discover the Well of the Souls— ah, who am I kidding. He thinks its a lollipop.

But that wasn’t the case with Fat Albert. It was very interesting for me to watch, as the kids on the show learned some pretty heavy things about racism, drugs and hoes. Mostly, it was very interesting for me because there weren’t many black kids at my elementary school. In fact, all the black kids in my school were named Gregory. (He was the only one.)

From Cosby and Fat Albert I learned a lot about inner-city strife, black people and ersatz junkyard bands. This is how Bill Cosby became a trusted part of my life.

Then, at 13 years of age, I became interested in computers and wanted to not only play video games, but create them as well. I had many systems to choose between: the venerable Tandy TRS-80; the Apple III; the IBM PC; the Timex Sinclair 1000; and the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. But only one of these had Bill Cosby as the spokesperson: the TI-99/4A. So that’s what I went with.

I can only imagine where the Apple or IBM road may have taken me. But I chose the TI and it was painful. I was working with stone tools. Don’t believe me? Check out the picture below. You could only expand by slapping another thing onto the side of the computer, or onto the thing you’d already slapped on. The potential result would be a low-tech chain of a comically unwieldy length.

The TI-99/4A was unintentionally hilarious. Like the rapper T.I.

Primitive as the computer was, using TI’s Extended Basic, I was still able to create my first video game. Well, like Gregory, it was the only one. (Synopsis: severed heads would fall from the sky and you had to run around catching them all. If you dropped too many, your head would fall off too. Grim!) Because of this painful experience, I pretty much lost interest in the whole coding dream. Who knows how my life may have been different if I chose a better computer system? Instead, naïve kid as I was, I followed this childhood mentor and TV pitchman into investing in this Edsel of technology.

Cosby had been right. I wasn’t careful and I learned something that year: Bill Cosby used his celebrity status to screw me, too.

And now you know the whole sordid story. Thanks, Hannibal Buress, for bringing this painful memory back.