25 Feb
2014
25 Feb
'14
3:19 a.m.
On 02/24/2014 06:51 PM, BE Arnold wrote:
Worth a read.
Allison
> On Feb 24, 2014, at 6:11 PM, "John Many
Jars" <john at yoyodyne-propulsion.net> wrote:
>
>> On 24 February 2014 22:04, allison <ajp166 at verizon.net> wrote:
>>
>> The console never ran hot. I have three plus one I modded.
> Mine did... if you left it on for a few hours random characters
> started popping up on the screen and the unit started to become
> erratic. I could have been misinterpreting this as "overheating"... I
> also had a plain 99/4 with the chicklet keyboard. They might have
> fixed that problem in the A model, whatever it was.
>
The non a with the crappy keyboard was problematic. They had more stuff in
the can and did little to remove the heat plus they used slower moto
6810 ram.
There were other issues. Price of being the early adopter sometimes.
The 4/a had a better keyboard and I never saw the issues you speak of.
>> As to being slow, seriously it was. It was
also very late into the
>> market and silly
>> expensive for the performance it offered. I bought mine (first one)
>> during the
>> great sellout and it was far cheaper or maybe closer to the right price.
> Yeah. for $100 it was a perfectly acceptable toy. For ten times that
> amount, an obscene rip-off.
>
>> As a collectable, they were like house files. But they did represent a
>> moment
>> in computer history. It was a good example of late and bad marketing.
>> IT was
>> a stellar example of putting a muzzle on what was a very good cpu to
>> save a buck
>> in hardware. One has to remember at that time 16Kx8 of DRam was about
>> $26 OEM
>> cost never mind supporting hardware so the hardware was cheap till it hurt.
> Absolutely. I was used to messing around with my friends Apple //.
> You could mess about with the machine more or less directly, write
> things in part or entirely in assembler for speed, etc.
Thats what different
is.
> The TI BASIC was just painfully slow, and they
completely locked you
> out of the rest of the system. There was no way around it without
> spending tons of money. Essentially, you had a very expensive
> cartridge game system with a keyboard.
It was no question. The big sell off
got me all that dirt cheap.
> I see it
not unlike the original TRS80 with its bus noise and keybounce,
>
I picked this link up from Jimmy Maher's article on the home computer
wars.
The article below is from Texas Monthly April 1984, it's a fairly in depth look at
the TI-99 failure.
(I'd run this thru a shortner, but I don't like the obfuscation)
http://books.google.no/books?id=DSsEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA136&lpg=PA136&…