TI 99/4a.
Cliff Click gave up in disgust trying to program this
thing. nuf said.
You do have a point. Interesting architecture & so on, but...
registers in external DRAM? Really?
IIRC, the worst feature wa that (in the base configuration) there was
almsot no RAM (if any at all) on the processor bus. Yor BASIC program ws
stored in spare locations of the video RAM. This meant that (a) readign
the BASIC program to execute it was ridiculously slow and (b) you
couldn't program it in machine code (since the RAM was not on the
processor bus). ARGH!
I think I Would put the VAX 11/730 on the list of 'daftest hardware
designs'. even though I like the machine overall. The processor microcode
is stored in DRAM. No I am not joking. This means that the procesosr has
to be haled every few ms while the control store RAM is refreshed. Every
other machine I've see with a writeable control store (that is, the
microcode is in RAM not ROM) has ued static RAM for this, for obvious
reasons.
-tony
