Ti 99 4A For Sale Portable Terminal Products
The contractor used TI's version of the Intel 8080A in addition to lots of TI TTL, memory, and other components.While Mojo sort of solved the desire for corporate synergy between the company's semiconductor and consumer products groups, the TMS9900 was more genuinely a TI microprocessor. He commissioned a third-party contractor to design and build a personal computer, code-named “Mojo," using only chips made by TI. Peter van Cuylenburg, who was in TI's European marketing division, came up with an innovative solution to this corporate pressure. Ultimately, the video game and personal computer efforts merged, and the business computer was moved to the Data Systems Division, where it was viewed with hostility and subsequently killed.The surviving home computer group, whose product was now known as the 99/4, started receiving lots of corporate “help," including pressure to use TI's troubled 16-bit TMS9900 microprocessor. Meanwhile, the business computer's intended market clearly overlapped with that of the minicomputer and portable terminal products, which came out of TI's Data Systems Division. The boundary between the video game and home computer groups, both of which were competing for resources in TI's facility in Lubbock, Texas, began to grow fuzzy.
Photo: Robert Clay/AlamyDespite being the world's first 16-bit home computer, the 99/4, like the microprocessor on which it was based, was a dog. But the machines performed poorly and the company took a $330 million write-off before exiting the home computer market. A revised version, the TI-99/4A was released in 1981 with a better keyboard, but it wasn't enough: In 1983, the New York Times called the 99/4 “an embarrassing failure."Embarrassing Failure: Texas Instruments had high hopes for its TI 99/4, which debuted in 1979, and the follow-on 99/4A (shown here). Rosen of Morgan Stanley, who was then the leading semiconductor analyst and fast becoming the leading personal computer analyst as well, wrote a humorous article about the disappointment of what was expected to be a major contender in the personal computer business. The 99/4 also ended up with a combination of features from the original video game design (including an ultracheap keyboard, RF clips to attach to a TV set, and ROM-based applications).When the 99/4 finally emerged in 1979, having somehow transcended three sets of TI management, it received mostly disparaging reviews.
Specifically, the large number of connecting pins for a 16-bit microprocessor forced TI to develop its own packaging technology. One reason they cost so much to build was the high cost of the TMS9900's unconventional packaging. TI saw sales of the 99/4A explode, eventually reaching 2.8 million units.But the 99/4 and 99/4A were expensive to build, and the company lost money on each home computer it sold. The price war was an incredible boon to consumers, because it made personal computers affordable to a much wider market. By 1982 Commodore had initiated a price war with its VIC-20 computer, forcing TI to first offer $100 rebates and eventually slash the price from an initial $1,150 to an unsustainable $49. Unsurprisingly, initial sales were weak.
But it couldn't compete with Commodore, which had a low-cost design and continued to lower the prices for its computers even further. As demand for the 99/4A soared, TI initiated a crash program to ramp up production. The lower-cost TMS9995 chip that followed the TMS9900 overcame some of these problems with an on-chip register file cache, but there was no easy way to substitute the TMS9995 for the TMS9900 in the TI-99/4 architecture.Meanwhile, most third-party software developers remained reluctant to invest in programs for the 99/4A.
Ti 99 4A For Sale Series Found Broad
The TMS9918 graphics chip, designed by TI's Karl Guttag, was central to the MSX standard and eventually was used in products from game manufacturers like Coleco and Sega, as well as Sony, Yamaha, and Toshiba. The MSX architecture was the brainchild of Kazuhiko Nishi, who founded a publishing company called ASCII Corp., which later became ASCII Microsoft. Remnants of that cult still exist today.Interestingly, the TMS9918 graphics controller used in the 99/4 series found broad usage in the MSX standard for home computers, which also used a Zilog Z80 microprocessor and the CP/M operating system from Digital Research. Ironically, by then the TI machine had a devoted following among users who had purchased the 99/4A because they couldn't resist its low price. In 1983 the company took a massive write-off of $330 million, and it abandoned the home computer business the following year.
Most of the ideas outlined below come from that essay. I later will explain its influence on the success of the IBM-PC.This essay is written from the perspective of an era as an electrical engineering student in the 1970s, and as a personal computer user from the 1980s onwards.In the 80's the company NEC Europa created an award and I participated in an article entitled "Darwin's law in electronics ?. Mobiles became an essential product when mothers saw that they were allowed to control their children and husbands.
This was a revolution because it digitized everything that was done on paper.In the second generation of calculators the HP25C competed with the TI58. Hewlett was an engineer and as such at his desk had: the slide rule, trigonometric conversion table books, Imperial System unit conversion books into the international metric system, and he saw that everything was condensed into the HP-35, the first generation of programmable pocket calculators. The breakdown was threefold, before companies owned hardware and software, from that time the manufacturer of CPUs was not the manufacturer of the computers, and neither was exclusively the manufacturer of the software.The world of calculators was also a new market in which initially there were HP, TI, Commodore, Sinclair, but in the end only HP and TI remained.It must remembered that Hewlett, vice president of the company, decided against the opinion of those (marketing) in the company who said that the programmable calculator had no future. We must not forget that Peter Drucker warned companies that they had to adapt to a changing environment, and must not forget that Darwin wrote that the animals that survived were the ones that adapted best in their environment.In the essay "Darwin's law in electronics? I coined the phrase "evolution and revolution." These two words are essential to understanding the evolution of any market that was new, completely changing and that modified the environment to which all the managers of the companies were accustomed.At the time of the birth of the Intel 4004 microprocessor for civilian use, two markets were created: that of computers, and that of computers.The microprocessor changed the environment, breaking the oligopoly of computer manufacturers IBM, Digital, NCR, HP and a few more, creating new brands with new products.
The TI58 incorporated what already existed, the encapsulation was different for another environment it was simply an evolution. The 8087 was the coprocessor for the cpu 8088/8086 and evolved to the 80386 because the cpu 80486 already carried it built-in.
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