3 Oct
2007
3 Oct
'07
10:13 a.m.
Actually 1980 was mid to late in the life of the TI9900 chip. The first
one I worked with was on a Technico Superstarter System, TI9900, 2k ram,
1k prom (monitor ans line by line asm) and a 2708 eprom programmer on
one board. I still have it. I purchased it at PCC '78 in in memory
serves Philly. Fir the amount of resource on the board it was pretty
capable for systems of that day.
That sure brings back memories. I also had a Technico SuperStarter (Two bytes
are better than one!) Eventually made a wire wrapped 32 KByte RAM card (using
TMS4060 non muxed 4K DRAMS), a 256x256 graphic display, A wire wrapped floppy
controller (8 inch with 16 KByte DRAM track buffer). The floppy was a
revelation after waiting for the papertape version of EAL (Editor Assembler
Linker?) to load.
> (Cheriton left before we actually got into using them at the software level
> and the distributed kernel would become the VKernel at Stanford on other hardware).
>
> Also, the description of the 9900 in Osborne's "An Introduction to
> Microcomputers, Vol II" ('76) fits well with my recollections of the 990/10.
I think I chose the 9900 based on the Osborne book, it had the shortest
benchmark program...
Interestingly TI's MSP430 has an instruction set reminiscent of the 9900
Peter Wallace