TI-99/4A Floppies - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

2 Oct 2007

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Subject: Re: TI-99/4A Floppies
   From: woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca>
   Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2007 17:52:04 -0600
     To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>

Brent Hilpert wrote:

  I guess home computing got tossed over to the
consumer products division at
 TI, which always seemed to have a bottom-of-the-line/low-end approach to
 things, too bad they didn't find some middle ground between that and their
 higher-end commercial/military stuff. 
Well the hand writing was on the wall after 1975 since in hindsight
we know that 16 bit computers with 32kw is just too small for any programs
after about 1975. Look how hard it was to cram advent on a 32K pdp8.
Ben. 
That doesn't apply to the TI9900. the reason is the PDP-8 is a 4k machine
with a minimal instruction set and memory extension.  The 990/9900
is a 32KW CISC machine that can support memory extension into the 
megabyte range.  You forget the PDP11 was a 16bit 32kW machine too 
and that was highly successful.  Advent fit on Z80 with 48Kb and PDP11 
(LSI-11/03)with 28K of ram.

The reason the TI990/9900 was not wide spread is TI was not a computer company
and despite having something decent they didn't market it until it was way 
too late. In 1976-77 the 9900 was about one generation ahead of the 8080
and maybe Z80.  Maybe the best code example is the line by line assembler 
along with a simple monitor all in 1K words.  It was capable of very dense 
code. 

Actually the 64kB limit was not starting to be problematic until around 
1978-9{or later} when applications like DBASE and VISICalc started filling 
ram.

Allison