4 Jun
1997
4 Jun
'97
3:33 a.m.
Sam Ismail <dastar(a)crl.com> said,
On a scarcely related note, has anyone ever seen (or
does anyone have) a
TI-99/4 (no "a")? I was reading an old issue of Creative Computing and
they mentioned the 99/4 in an article about the 4a.
I saw (and used for a few minutes) one of these, years and years ago
(1984?) at a meeting of the TI Hoosier Users Group in Indianapolis.
The main differences from the 99/4A were:
* chicklet keys, and no lowercase -- the punctuation marks and
cursor motions that you get with the FCTN key on a 4A were
produced with the Shift key instead.
* older video chip -- the TMS9918 instead of 18A. I think the
difference here was that it didn't have the 256x192 bitmap mode,
only the character-cell modes.
* monitor required. Market pressures were part of the reason the
TI price dropped so much, but the major reason was that TI
couldn't get FCC approval for an RF modulator in time for the
release of the 99/4 so you had to buy it with a monitor. They
were approved by the time of the 99/4a so you could use it with
your TV and get by with a much cheaper system.
I think the Peripheral Expansion Box also came out at the time of
the 99/4A, ending the need to string endless piles of boxes off the
side of the keyboard if you wanted the disk drive, speech synthesizer,
or whatever.
They also mentioned a system called the 99/8 (I think
it was that)
that was built but never released because TI decided to get out of
the home computer market.
There was also a TI-99/2, with rubber keys and black-and-white video,
meant to compete with the Timex/Sinclair segment of the market. It
never got released because the prices of the higher-end machines
plummeted and squeezed it out of its price range.
eric