TI-990 recollections - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

8 Mar 2005

Pardon me while I step back into my past a bit.  I really
enjoyed working with the 990, and want to share some of my
experiences with anyone else that enjoyed the 990 as well.

...
  I'm in contact with two gents who worked on
TI-990's back in
 the 80's. Since this platform doesn't get a lot of traffic on
 the list, I thought I'd share their recollections of working
 on these systems.

 ======== Gentleman N

 [ Referring to the pictures/links posted a few days ago of a
 [ TI-990 in L.A. ...

 The disk drives for this computer is actually a pair of drives in one 
...
  enclosure.  One removable and the other
"fixed" internally.  They both 
...
  have the same capacity (5MB I think). 
You're dead on.  If memory serves (and more and more, it doesn't :-)
the drive was the CDC "Hawk" drive -- five up, and five down.  The
bottom platter was fixed; the top was removable.

...
  The funky terminal is just that.  It's a great
monochrome terminal with 
...
  addressable cursor and it is fast for its day when
compared to 
 VT52/VT100s. 
Yeah baby!  The 911/VDT.  It was pretty sweet.  I believe the cable
...
 from the tube to the system was coax for the video,
plus a few lines for the kbd.  The tubes were fast to display information.  And a 
really lovely green color.

I remember that DX-10 had a really nice user interface, and the 
commands were quite mnemonic.  You could even write your own little
shell scripts and they would integrate nicely with the existing
system utilities.

I always thought (and still do) that it was a well engineered 
system.

...
  The OS seemed decent from what little I used it but I
never did any 
 programming with it.  In 1986 I helped out Bryan with an old client in 
...
  Honolulu who had a rack mounted version with three
DS10's where two of 
...
  the unit (four drives) had failed with head crashes
(don't move packs 
...
  between drives after those funny scrapping sounds
begin).  The service 
...
  guy had the system already repaired and I helped get
the their 
 accounting system going again.  I went back 1987-89 and wrote a new 
 version running on i386/AT&T Unix System V Release 3 so they could have 
...
  more modern hardware.

 It was a nice system...but not an IBM 1401 (or CDC 8090)! 
My brother and I did similar things with his system.  We were writing
accounting packages in Ryan-McFarland ("RM") Cobol.  It was really a
lot of fun, and I was writing an average of one good-sized file 
maintenance application per day.  I believe it really was a pretty
productive system for its time.  It even had a decent keyed file 
capability (one primary key, multiple secondary keys) that we 
really exploited in our work.

We wrote systems for several companies in Seattle.  One of them was
a company that manufactured blue jeans -- they were quite a cast of
characters.  At one time, the company name was "Bearbottoms", then
it was "James Jean", and then something else.  

The guy that owned the company made money hand over fist -- it was
said that he paid something like $2.00 to get a pair of jeans sewn
in Mexico, which then sold at the Bon or Nordstroms for something 
like $30.00.  

...
  ========

 ======== Gentleman A

 Wow, that's a (nice) blast from the past.  And to help connect the dots,
...
  I am a friend of Bill's who handed over a customer
with one of these for
...
  Bill to provide software support. 

 I had a 2 person company (sales guy and me) that developed business
 applications for a chain of radio stations, and we needed a system that
...
  we could resell 1) quickly; 2) with no cash upfront;
3) that was
 reasonably powerful for a multi-user terminal based application.

 This was around 1980, and we talked to all the usual suspects, DEC, Data
...
  General, HP, maybe Wang... It's been a while. 
Anyway the TI folks
 basically sold us a machine and delivered it, no cash down, 120 days to
...
  pay, lots of support, etc.  I had the thing in my
living room of my
 bachelor-pad apartment for a few months of development and testing, then
...
  we delivered it to the client.

 The application was in Fortran (is that correct Bill?), but I remember
...
  writing a few little assembler tools and twiddling a
few bits here and
...
  there.  Once we delivered it to the customer my access
was somewhat
 limited to bug-fix and enhancements during evenings and weekends, so I
...
  didn't get to play with it as much as I would have
liked.

 The coolest thing  I remember from the OS was a near real-time display
...
  of in-memory processes.  Sort of a graphical version
of 'top' mapped
 onto physical addresses. 
I know *exactly* what command you are talking about.  That would be
the "Show Memory Map" command, and it *was* a heck of a lot of fun
to watch.

You could really get a feel for exactly what the machine was doing, 
when it was rolling jobs in and out of memory.  You'd see big chunks
of the screen change (from bright green (reverse video) to darker
green, IIRC) as the system rolled jobs between disk and memory.

I remember one of the companies we worked with, IALC, had a 990/12,
and they bought a 911 VDT to do nothing but sit in the glass computer
room and run SMM all day long :-)

I'm currently talking with someone about getting a 990/10 of my own.
Don't know if it will happen (the system is pretty far away), but I
am excited at the possibility of getting my hands on one of these
systems again.  

Well, that's enough for now.  Thanks for letting me relive some 
old memories.

John Sambrook

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