29 Sep
2021
29 Sep
'21
9:04 a.m.
On Wed, 29 Sept 2021 at 17:45, John Many Jars
<john at yoyodyne-propulsion.net> wrote:
I had a TI 99/4 when I was a kid. It was my first computer (although I used my
friend's Apple ][ much more).
All I can say is, what a piece of garbage. It was horrible in every way, and it
overheated if you left it on too long. SLOWEST BASIC EVER!
Harsh but not entirely unfair.
It had, IMHO, a lot of foolish compromises, including the BASIC in an
interpreted bytecode and a crippled memory bus.
But if there hadn't been a price war, most of its defects would have
been fixed in the announced, demonstrated but cancelled, TI-99/8.
https://www.99er.net/998.html
10MHz 16-bit machine with Extended BASIC _and_ Pascal included, speech
synthesis, expandable to 16MB RAM... all before the Mac, let alone the
Amiga.
And a relative of that *did* ship, later on, in the form of the Geneve
9640, a replacement motherboard that fitted into the 99's Peripheral
Expansion Box.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneve_9640
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ? Skype: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 ? ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702-829-053