23 Feb
2014
23 Feb
'14
11:59 a.m.
On 02/23/2014 11:35 AM, allison wrote:
The TI99/4 suffered from narrowing the bus and storing
it in a
serial oriented byte wide system where a program jump required
sending a new pointer to the start of a routine and I might add the
code was NOT in native assembler but in an interpreted form.
I've long thought that the strangling of the bus done on the TI 99/4
home PC was quite possibly motivated by TI's not wanting to compete with
its own 990 series of computers. The cost of a TI 990/4 was
considerably higher than a 99/4, even though both use the same MPU.
I find the I2L versions of the 9900 far more interesting as far as chips
go. They were used quite often in military gear, not as devices offered
to the general unwashed. In a similar way, one did not see the
Fairchild 9940 in much general audience gear.
--Chuck