TI-990 recollections

I'm in contact with two gents who worked on TI-990's back in the 80's. Since this platform doesn't get a lot of traffic on the list, I thought I'd share their recollections of working on these systems. ======== Gentleman N [ Referring to the pictures/links posted a few days ago of a [ TI-990 in L.A. ... The disk drives for this computer is actually a pair of drives in one enclosure. One removable and the other "fixed" internally. They both have the same capacity (5MB I think). The funky terminal is just that. It's a great monochrome terminal with addressable cursor and it is fast for its day when compared to VT52/VT100s. The OS seemed decent from what little I used it but I never did any programming with it. In 1986 I helped out Bryan with an old client in Honolulu who had a rack mounted version with three DS10's where two of the unit (four drives) had failed with head crashes (don't move packs between drives after those funny scrapping sounds begin). The service guy had the system already repaired and I helped get the their accounting system going again. I went back 1987-89 and wrote a new version running on i386/AT&T Unix System V Release 3 so they could have more modern hardware. It was a nice system...but not an IBM 1401 (or CDC 8090)! ======== ======== Gentleman A Wow, that's a (nice) blast from the past. And to help connect the dots, I am a friend of Bill's who handed over a customer with one of these for Bill to provide software support. I had a 2 person company (sales guy and me) that developed business applications for a chain of radio stations, and we needed a system that we could resell 1) quickly; 2) with no cash upfront; 3) that was reasonably powerful for a multi-user terminal based application. This was around 1980, and we talked to all the usual suspects, DEC, Data General, HP, maybe Wang... It's been a while. Anyway the TI folks basically sold us a machine and delivered it, no cash down, 120 days to pay, lots of support, etc. I had the thing in my living room of my bachelor-pad apartment for a few months of development and testing, then we delivered it to the client. The application was in Fortran (is that correct Bill?), but I remember writing a few little assembler tools and twiddling a few bits here and there. Once we delivered it to the customer my access was somewhat limited to bug-fix and enhancements during evenings and weekends, so I didn't get to play with it as much as I would have liked. The coolest thing I remember from the OS was a near real-time display of in-memory processes. Sort of a graphical version of 'top' mapped onto physical addresses. ========