24 Feb
2014
24 Feb
'14
3:51 p.m.
On Feb 24, 2014, at 6:11 PM, "John Many
Jars" <john at yoyodyne-propulsion.net> wrote:
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&…
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.
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.
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.
> I see it not unlike the original TRS80 with its bus noise and keybounce,
>