TI 990 architecture / was Re: TI-99/4A Floppies - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

3 Oct 2007

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Subject: Re: TI 990 architecture / was Re: TI-99/4A Floppies
   From: "Peter C. Wallace" <pcw at mesanet.com>
   Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2007 10:13:12 -0700 (PDT)
     To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>

 Actually 1980 was mid to late in the life of the TI9900 chip. The first
 one I worked with was on a Technico Superstarter System, TI9900, 2k ram,
 1k prom (monitor ans line by line asm) and a 2708 eprom programmer on
 one board. I still have it.  I purchased it at PCC '78 in in memory
 serves Philly.  Fir the amount of resource on the board it was pretty
 capable for systems of that day. 

That sure brings back memories. I also had a Technico SuperStarter (Two bytes 
are better than one!) Eventually made a wire wrapped 32 KByte RAM card (using  
I still have mine and it's operational.

...
 TMS4060 non muxed 4K DRAMS), a 256x256 graphic display,
A wire wrapped floppy 
controller (8 inch with 16 KByte DRAM track buffer). The floppy was a 
revelation after waiting for the papertape version of EAL (Editor Assembler 
Linker?) to load. 
Did do all that with mine.  Mostly used it for small playing and dumping 
2708 eproms.

...
  > (Cheriton
left before we actually got into using them at the software level
> and the distributed kernel would become the VKernel at Stanford on other hardware).
>
> Also, the description of the 9900 in Osborne's "An Introduction to
> Microcomputers, Vol II" ('76) fits well with my recollections of the 990/10.

I think I chose the 9900 based on the Osborne book, it had the shortest 
benchmark program... 
Strikingly so. 

...
 Interestingly TI's MSP430 has an instruction set
reminiscent of the 9900 
Instruction sets tend to repeat and reoccur.

Allison