An American perspective on the late great Sir Clive Sinclair, from Fast Company

[Liam Proven]

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

-- 
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