When I joined TI in 1973, calculators we were part of the semiconductor division, later it became the Consumer Products Division. The early Datamath calculator had 3 circuit boards and about 100 components, mostly to support the PMOS processor. They sold for around $165 at Nieman-Marcus. When I left TI 1978, we were building TI-1200 calculators at a rate of 75,000 per day and they were selling at check-out stands for $10. I designed production test equipment, it was a hell of a ride.
@@grantd8629 I didn't work in a fab. I was hired to help set-up the calculator production in an old Cooks Department Store in Lubbock. TI had several small plants in Lubbock. Later we moved to the new big plant on the North side of Lubbock. I was able to escape and move back to the main group in Dallas just before Bucy moved the entire consumer products engineering to Lubbock. TI lost so many good engineers due to that forced move. I was drafted into the Corporate Engineering Center in Dallas where I spent two years.
@@ronmaximilian6953 When I joined in 1973, TI was run like a group of small companies, each cost center was a group of people with a mission. When J Fred Bucy took over, things changed a lot. I guess it needed to be done, but Consumer Products lost almost all of its engineering staff after the move to Lubbock.
I had a TI 59 programmable back in the day along with the printer. That thing was definitely the stud in science class. That's actually the first thing I ever owned that had a programmable memory with magnetic storage
I love how Commodore nearly failed and had to leave the calculator business due to TI vertically integrating and then made a computer that made TI lose money and leave the personal computer business
Jack Tramiel did it on purpose, he wanted revenge on TI. Once Commodore had bought MOS technologies they not only had control of the 6502 processor but also could make highly integrated custom chips for their computers. Business is war was what Jack used to say. The TI was an okay machine, definitely well built. The fact it was 16-bit was pretty much lost given the weird and limited architecture of the processor. Plus that made no difference until the video and sound capabilities shined.
@@6581punkit's kind of hard to call what Jack was doing "business" when his personal vendetta against TI was so strong it almost killed Commodore and resulted in major losses soon after due to an over-flooded market and price wars.
@@ki5aokthe 99/4a could be crashed by pulling out the ROM cartridge, Oops I mean Solid-State Software module. The screen would freeze, or get garbled, but the sprites kept moving, and the last note of music was stuck on, due to the DMA/Interrupt system still going.
Same, but I got it from a yard sale at that age around 1990 or 1991. Learned far more with it than I did the Mac Plus I got in 1994 (hand-me-down from another family)!
My first computer and I never enjoyed anything as much since. I got it for Christmas in 1983, cost $50 at Kmart. People were lined up at the door for it's release. We all ran to the back of the store to get the limited supply and the people running knocked over a pallet of glasses, which shattered all over the floor in front of me. I was a scared 12 year old but I also thought it was pretty cool. I loved it for gaming.
Same here. Got one for Christmas when it was $50, however it was actually released a few years earlier at a much higher price. I remember my uncle mentioning to me that he was not happy because he bought one for $900 a year or two before the big price drop to $50.
Oh yeah it was a great computer but wasn't really known for gaming though. Commodore was great for gaming as they were cheaper so had a larger customer base so developers started making games. The Vic 20 was great for game but it was really the 64 that turned it into a gaming monster. TI should have lowered the price.
The TI 99-4/A was my first computer. Dad picked one up in their fire sale and we occasionally found carts that would run on it. Despite the fact that it wasn't compatible with CompuServe, he still managed to get it to connect and get useable data out of it. I copied so many games out of magazines to tape and floppy… I don't miss how hard computers were back then, but sometimes I do.
Awesome. It was my first computer too. Used basic and began with a simple version of ‘life’. Aside from various games, there was a lot of competition for the only TV in the house, lol
When I worked at TI in the early 80s there was a group adapting Speak and Spell to a military application. We’d hear it saying things like “close the hatch” or “not ready” across the wall dividing our working area from theirs (I was also working military hardware). For their project my coworkers coined the name “Speak and Kill”. I still have a working TI wristwatch that I have used recently. It’s losing time probably because the package housing the tuning fork timebase crystal has slowly admitted a bit of air. In the first year I owned it, though, it was accurate to within 7 seconds. Great video! Thank you!
for many years, all I knew of Texas Instruments was that they made the very expensive graphing calculator that my grandpa saved and pinched his pension pennies to buy me as an early birthday present for the start of school when i was 14 - not because a graphing calculator was what i wanted most in the world for my birthday, but because having one was required in order to take the higher-level math courses in high school that i would need in order to get into a good college for sciences, and we were far far too poor for mom to have ever bought it along with my regular basic school supplies. crazy to learn all this history behind that one extremely expensive chunk of circuits which had all the adults in my family scratching their heads. i actually do remember my high school calculus teacher, who had been there since the school opened and was about three years from retirement, going off on a tangent once about how she remembered back when calculators first came out when she was a young brand-new teacher fresh out of college, and when she was our age, they had to do everything with slide rules. like you, i had no idea what a slide rule was or how it worked; i think in my head i pictured an abacus lol. great video jon!
My father was a mechanical engineer, worked at Ford for 37 years. He personally witnessed the launch of the 69 Mustang in Edison, NJ. Anyways, when I went off to engineering school in the '80s, he gave me his whole drafting table setup, protractors, symbol templates,French curve, scale rulers, and a slide rule. I only ever used the drafting aids for quick sketches, where it would take Autocad longer to boot from the monstrous 20MB hard drive on my '286. For the first 20 years of my career, I had the slide rule taped to the top front bezel of my desktop monitor. It was ptouch labelled "BACKUP COMPUTER"
Had a ti99/4a when I was a kid. Learned a lot on that little thing. Saved paper route and birthday money to buy a used Apple II clone and moved on, but that little ti was my first computer, and it was great!
Loved its audio capability with real chords and a decent frequency range. Was it three tone channels and one noise channel? I remember using it as a 10kHz and 20kHz source to splatter my CB signal two channels above and below the one I was talking on. Music too, and hand digitized photography, but the radio splatter was the most fun.
my dad bought when I was a kid, loved to learn programming on and played a lot of games. I did not know it was a failure, still have good memories putting in a cassette tape when saved files. my dad bought a Apple IIc later, I was not a big fan of that one.
I also had a TI99/4A. I would have never traded it for an Apple II with its garbage pasudo-color graphics, lack of sprites, beep and bloop cruddy sound chip, and no speech synthesis. We had to use that trash in elementary school.
Bought one for the family for $99 when TI liquidated their stock. Paid $70 for Parsec the week before Christmas as they were super hard to get. Got the voice synthesizer, Extended BASIC Mini Memory Module cartridges and a bunch more. Bought ALL the Adventure International text adventures. I wound up using it more than my son. Learned to program on this little gem, which led to an enjoyable career in IT.
That was my sentiment. That computer made me switch what I wanted to do in life from meteorology to IT. Love to study weather. Love to program computers more.
The only problem with the 99/4 SERIES was they did not decode the full peripheral address, thus throwing away the lower bits. 3 things the TI 99/4 did that stood out to me. 1) Sprites 2)Speech (also in Speak and Spell) on a chip 3)GROM (brilliant. Load a start address, then simply clock out however many bytes you needed. Repeat ) The first 99/4 had a chicklet keyboard that bugged typists. The add on modules plugged into the side and were a pain to keep attached (I think they had no clue how popular they were going to be). A friend nailed strips on his desk to keep them inline. The 4A fixed the keyboard issue. A 'new' expansion chassis mostly handled the multiple card (module) issue (The cord was compatible with all 99/4 and had no retention solution, making moving the keyboard, still an issue/
@@steveurbach3093 You're right, they put a 16-bit processor on an 8-bit bus, which cut the processing power in half. Wasted potential. I never played with a 99/4, only the 99/4A. It was initially for my parents, so they can do things like balance a checkbook, etc. They never actually used it...me being my 10-year old self, I hijacked it from them and started experimenting with the Basic programming language. Such fond memories.
@@steveurbach3093My favorite piece of hw/sw (besides the Speech Synthesizer, of course) was the "Mini Memory" cartridge. Had a neat little Monitor/ Assembler/Disassembler sw ROM on there, with a 4KB static RAM workspace which was..get this..Battery Backed-UP! You could partition and label multiple memory spaces within the 4K, and the programs you stored there would show up on the Boot Screen: [Press 1 for TI Basic] [Press 2 for Your 1st Program] [Press 3 for Your 2nd Program] &c. &c. Too bad TI committed consumer product seppuku by waging a price war with Jack Tramiel. In global politics, rule 1 is, Don't get involved in a land war in Asia. Rule 2 is, Don't get involved in a price war with Jack "The Commodore" Tramiel.
Really enjoyed this history lesson! I bought a TI 99/4A around '83 and loved it. Not the same machine, but I have a working model in my collection right now.
IIRC this was the computer you could use to mess with the neighbors garage doors and the dogs and other smaller mammals in the area. It could produce ultrasonic sounds and many garage door openers were simple, unencrypted, ultrasonic tones. When I was doing work towards an EE degree a few years later (early 90's) I knew classmate that had done just that a time or two in his early/mid teens.
Early computers were not very compliant with the regulations. In fact, the Apple 2 shipped without the RF port and it was your decision to fit the port. It was the only way it could be sold legally. I think someone used the Altair computer to make music by generating RF interference.
I don't exactly remember TI fondly. My generation (of Danes in the 2000's in highschool) was required to acquire a Ti30 calc which now is priced reasonably around $30 but back then cost around $150 and even more for higher than mandatory levels.
I love my little black TI-30 with its red digital display. Bought with money from my after school job at around 1978 when I started at Haslev Gymnasium 🇩🇰.
My first "real" calculator was a TI-51. Had all the trig functions and all that. Could also write a script of several repetitive steps. The problem I had with it was the key pad. I could press the key, and nothing would show up. Other times, I'd press a digit and get several of those digits. This made it hard to use in class when taking a test. I didn't have much money in college, and that TI-55 had to get me through. The battery couldn't hold a charge, so I clearly remember (40+ years later), getting a seat in Thermo early, so I could find a seat along the wall where I could plug in to the outlet. That feels like yesterday. That calculator could have been nice, but it was torture to use.
I had to get a TI-83 in high school, about 25 years ago. It cost $100. The TI-83 Plus has dropped in price all the way down to... $80. I think the schools have since "upgraded" to the TI-84 Plus, which costs... I bet you can guess what it costs.
I'm 63. I learned to use my grandfather's slide rule somewhere around the age of 16 (second year of high school) when I first learned about logarithms. The primary purpose of a slide rule is to use logarithms to convert multiplication into addition and division into subtraction. The design of a slide rule makes it easy to find the logarithm of two numbers, add or subtract them, and read the resulting value with a reasonable degree of precision (assuming you have good vision).
I’m 79, and used a 10” slide rule during sporadic attempts at a university education in the 1960s. For chain calculations, the slide rule will whip a calculator’s butt. . . and an added benefit was that it taught one to be very aware of orders of magnitude in any calculation. I still have that slide rule.
My dad used slide rules in his early career and bought an HP-35 scientific calculator in 74-ish for like $400, which was worth about $1600 in Y2K-dollars. I learned to use a circular slide rule “E6B” as a helicopter flight engineer in the early ‘90’s. I’m 53 now and enjoy collecting slide-rule type calculators.
Kept crashing coming out of the refueling tunnels, till I finally wondered what "LIFT 3" on the screen meant. Eventually read the little game booklet, and immediately was embarrassed that I had been playing that game for the better part of a year completely unaware of the Lift options 🤦🏽♂
One of the less appreciated aspects of the TI 99 story is that when TI decided to get out of the computer market, they put the 99/4 a on sale for far less than it was previously retailing for. My mother got one for me for $50 for Christmas when I was nine years old. It made it possible for me to discover computing at an early age. In the late 80s there was an aftermarket Renaissanceof of 99/4 a accessories. I was able to buy a printer and other software in high school and my mother actually wrote her masters thesis on our old 99/4A.
At 26:35 what you see isn't just a "Radio thingy" - it was the 9100 the first solid state LORAN-C navigation receiver for airplanes. It had a big improvement in performance and weight to the tube type navigation receivers and also had lots of features that the tube type competition couldn't touch.
I had a chance to work in the TI Marine Comm-Nav lab at TI on an associated project (GPS HDUE/MANPACK) at the time (1978) and they had purchased all the large LORAN-C competitors 'boxes' that required one to line up the 'pulses' Loran C used in order to compute position ... so TI had evaluated the market competition product back then.
Mine never failed. I've owned one since 83, and now own three, all of them in working order. I have several sidecars as well as a Peripheral Expansion Box with quite a few cards inside. My setup will even communicate with the internet, Brother typewriter, Panasonic dot matrix color printer, and my Raspberry Pi 4. I did have a keyboard issue once, but it was nothing a conductive pen could not fix. Long live TI and the TI-99/4 and 4a.
This was my second computer, after the Timex Sinclair with the membrane keyboard. The TI was my first introduction to BASIC programming, and I clearly remember the jumble of noise that it made when saving my little programs to an analog cassette tape. I don’t know what happened to that old thing, but I wish that I still had it today.
Hey me too. TS-1000 was my first, TI-99/4A was next, then a Coleco Adam Clone before finally getting a "real" computer - a TRS-80 Model III. I still have my TS-1000.
Sounds like it'd be an interesting watch :) I'm not interested enough to research it myself (lol) but I would very likely watch a video of it if they made one!
When the 64-bit version of Excel came out, with its vastly increased rows and columns, I asked the Microsoft Excel team at CES if they planned to upgrade its math calculator to be able to use multiple CPUs. They said they had no plans to do so. Excel was just so damned slow to improve the product. Large spreadsheets had glacial load times from hard drives. It still doesn't have an easy method to do math within the cell name call, so you have to do gymnastics with a lot of scenarios. And you always had to know all the workarounds to iterate calculus functions.
I got that computer in my room as i write this comment. clicked the video cause i recognized that machine. It was given to me by the old man who ran the place that had it. Was bought back in the day for a recreation center for people who were done with school but had to go to a center to do stuff till parents got home from work So want to play any of the funky dragon mix? Or maybe "Computer Math Games II" ?I got all the accessories the center had bought for it and it still works
Also from that era: Mattel Electronics' personal home computer Aquarius! It had the second worst keyboard, gummy little chiclet keys. The worst was the Timex/Sinclair 1000.
Back in the 80ies my father used slide rules to calculate the operational parameters of nuclear reactors he was working with in USSR, Bulgaria and Hungary. It was a wide-spread tool, since electronic calculators were way too expensive for "common" engineers.
When I was in 6th grade (we're talking 1993-1994), my teacher actually taught us how to use slide rules! I think she was trying to prepare us for a future of using them... but... we were already ten-plus years into the computer revolution. Her heart was in the right place, tho, and I ended up buying a few slide rules over the years because of how fondly I remembered that lesson. :D
Entire Mercury and Apollo programs calculations were double checked using slide calculators, as computers were still new thing and not fully trusted. And im pretty sure Soviet engineers used them aswell, as computers were...none.
It wasn't until after HS that calculators came out, so I had learned on slide rules! Hard to believe that we made it to the Moon, using slide rules for all the engineering along the way. I had several slide rules of different sizes and even a circular slide rule that fit in a shirt pocket!! It was pretty cool because of its compact size. I guess it was a precursor to the pocket calculator.
@Turnipstalk Slide rules were much better than "approximations". 3 decimal precision was pretty common. Yes, human "computers", (not "human calculators"), were used and many calculations used existing scientific tables developed by human computers'. But the real key to necessary precision is largely tied to how precisely you could easily measure! That in turn was how precisely you could make something. 1/1000th of a unit was considered pretty accurate and in a practical sense, better precision was not really usable. Often, even the calculations made by computers is in a way an "approximation" because we have things repeating or recurring decimals and prime numbers. Early computers were pretty limited in the size of numbers they could handle. In the end the degree of precision needed is limited by what you can practically use. Anything more accurate is just overkill if you can't really use it.
TI's failure in home computers really showed in the UK which was the most competitive in the world at the time with a vast number of domestic designs competing with imports. The 994 was invisible but Commodore's offerings competed successfully with Acorn, Sinclair, etc..
The TI99/4 was £990 on release in the UK. Atari 800 was cheaper and better (same release year). People's first computer was often a cheaper one as they didn't quite know if they really needed one. Some people with lots of money of course went into whole heartedly and bought an Apple 2, BBC Micro etc.
TI’s TI-990 series mini computers sold quite well. It was TI marketing’s fault that the microcomputer was hamstrung with only 256 bytes of directly attached RAM (all the rest was attached to the TMS9918 video controller and accessed by slow port read/writes) as they didn’t want it to compete with their lucrative mini sales. The TMS9900 wasn’t the device that was late to the party, the microcomputer was originally intended to use the planned TMS9995 microprocessor, which had the RAM onboard and an 8 bit data bus. Because this was very late they shipped the machine with the TMS9900, which required a complex 4 phase clock, multiple power rails, 16 bit support components etc.
Yes. The 9995 would have been better. The memory based register architecture that the family used really needed the speed of on-chip RAM. It's why the TI99/4A ended up using a pair of 6810 ram chips for the workspace registers. Putting the main storage on the 9918 video processor gave a double penalty of only 8 bit accesses and much slower access times. Also, the processor family had a weird serialised I/O architecture known as the CRU (or Communications Register Unit). This was great for reducing pin count on peripheral chips (9902 UART was only 18 pins for example), but it also meant I/O accesses for some peripherals were so much slower than the competition. I worked with 9900 and designed hardware around the later 99105 in the 1980s. Fun days!
Getting the Mini Memory Module and it's 4K of CPU addressable RAM was a revelation, as was learning 9900 assembler. The performance was there but the base system hid it away.
I used a 99/4a as a 440 MHz repeater controller for a number of years ... using the speech synthesizer to make announcements and a CRU interface card I designed (using TTL address decoders and the 9334 8 bit addressable latch for I/O) that plugged into the expansion port on the right side ...
@@stevewausa Thanks for mentioning that. I had one of those for my 9/4A, and I've been reading down the comments hoping somebody would mention it to remind me of the name. Had a blast with assembly language with that little guy.
On the contrary, The Speak & Spell was widely popular and was indeed the first tablet. What? It had a keyboard, a display, a true processor, ROM, an expansion port, and an OS.
OMG I HAD ONE AS A LITTLE KID!!! (in the early 90s!!) I CAN STILL REMEMBER THE MALE VOICE AND THE LITTLE MENU TONES! it had a two row 2x8 character dot matrix display, Man......
I was taught to use a slide rule in 1986 (long after calculators had taken over). It was a requirement to join the Royal Navy as an artificer at the time and the head of mathematics taught meet during a 2 hour detention period he was overseeing The guys on detention sat mesmerised as I sat with the teacher going through it all (and to be fair they said to me later they couldn’t believe I understood it all) Oh I had a VIC-20 too
I wanted a 99/4 in the worst way, especially when the price went down. In the end I held off for a computer that had development tools and a compiler at a reasonable price. A Zenith clone and Turbo Pascal finally made that click and served until Linux became available. And I do know how to operate a slide rule, calculators didn't become cost effective until I was out of school.
The TI was my computer between the ZX81 and Coleco ADAM. We had a knack for getting the wrong system for the time. I went on to side with the TurboGrafx-16 over Genesis and MiniDisc over MP3.
Wow, I also started with the Timex Sinclair 1000, went to the TI-99/4a, then got a Coleco ADAM (Gotta love those tape drives and noisy daisy wheel printer). Honestly the Sinclair was the best computer to learn on of that bunch, even with how limited it was. I went TRS-80 after that, then into PCs in 1987.
Thanks for the series of brilliant synopsys of different IT/science videos. Re the slide rile, they are just analogue computers, simple to use. My first college electrinics/matamatics/science teacher, an ex UK RAF engineer gave us two good bits of advice, 1 volunteer to do things if you are able and secondly use a slide rule on complex exam papers the slide rule will give you the close approximat answer to the exam question. I still have several Faber-Castell and others. Unfortunately, the last were made from plastic, not wood, metal, and glass, as the early were made and the plastic has degraded and distorted. Thanks again
I owned a TI-99/4A back in the day. You could hook it up to a TV but the resolution was atrocious. One thing it was superb at was the Space Invaders game which came standard with it. It was exactly like the original. I enjoyed many hours playing it.
It was the only video games I had when I was a kid. I can’t remember the names of those cartridge games but I had five or six in total. I remember a game with cactus 🌵 and timed blocks you had to shoot with your little ship before aliens hatched. At least I think that’s how it worked, so long ago i barely remember. I learned to type on a typing game on there. So cool to see this video, memories! 😃👍🏻
4:54 - That plane is the venerable P-3 Orion. The stinger tail is where the magnetometer lives. My first cousin was an avionics engineer for that aircraft. When I worked in Mountain View, CA, those planes flew over our office building several times per day, flying out of Moffett Field, out over the Bay, and back again. To this day, I don't know if they were training flights, actual patrols, or a little of each. The other plane we saw a lot was the C-130 Hercules. Although about 30% larger than the P-3, its high wing was the most obvious difference.
The TI-99 4/A was my first home computer. I loved it! I taught myself programming in the BASIC language at age 14, just in time to be one of the first students at my high school to attend the new computer classes (featuring Apple computers). Today I am a well-compensated software engineer who has worked in NYC, Austin, TX, and Silicon Valley. The "failed" Texas Instruments computer was an important part of my successful career.
This video brought back major memories. I remember having a Speak & Spell, but I had completely forgotten about my Little Professor Calculator. As soon as I saw it on the screen, though I'm now 48, I could feel the buttons under my fingers! Later I had a TI-99, but I don't remember much about it except that we owned it and it had a cassette drive peripheral in addition to the cartridge slot. We probably only had it a few months when I set a massive magnet on the top of it, right where the ventilation grille is above the cartridge slot. It immediately (and mysteriously) went TU, and to this day I've never told that story to my parents. I feel guilty even now at the amount of money that went down the drain that day.
The TI-99/4A was my first computer. I was extremely late (early ‘90s) since it was a yard sale find but I learned to code BASIC on it. ;) It was WAY more helpful than the hand-me-down Mac Plus I got from another family in church (1994). We literally had to upgrade to a high-density floppy drive just to install Word Perfect.
The TMS-9900 processor was an incredibly-powerful 16-bit processor with 16 general-purpose workspace registers. However, there were many architectural design mistakes that led to frustration among TI computer users. The base configuration had almost NO CPU memory (just 256 bytes, or 128 16-bit words at >8300). All memory was "VDP" or video memory, which was slow, serially-accessed 8-bit memory that required writing the address first then reading a stream of bytes. The BASIC interpreter was mostly double-interpreted, using an 8-bit machine-language called GDP (documented in TI 99-4A INTERN), making it extremely slow. (Also, floating point numbers were implemented in base-100, making display relatively quick but calculations slow.) Writing machine-language (assembly-language) was not particularly inviting or easy for new users, since you had to buy an expensive 32KB memory expansion module (or a cheaper 4KB Mini-Memory cartridge) and a Peripheral Expansion Box to put it into, before you could even run machine code. (Cartridge games were typically 8KB and ran directly from ROM, so they didn't need expansion memory to run machine code.) TI's decision to try to monopolize the software market for their own computer was a major reason for their failure, as I see it.
I disagree that the 9900 was powerful. It actually had no internal general purpose registers, rather it used the first 16 words of ram as register locations. This made the logic simple but execution slow. It's been over 45 years since I had my single-board 9900 so I don't remember much about the architecture but the registers I do recall.
@@garymartin9777 Sure, that was a factor, limiting speed to maybe 200k to 500k ops/sec at 3mhz, but double-interpretation of BASIC, encoded in GPL bytecode, was a far bigger factor. I'm just saying, with the VDP processor (for sprites) and other features, the hardware was actually pretty good for its day for assembly-language coding (compared to, for example, 6502.) But lack of a true stack was disappointing, to me, as it makes implementation of recursion and higher-level languages and compilers more difficult.
My best friend got a 99/4A for Christmas and the two of us typed in a lot of the demonstration programs in the manual. I was so excited to see what "transparent" was going to look like, because my C64 didn't have that color... and then we realized it's just what every other computer called the "background color."
But it was only the background color if that pixel was over the background. If it was over a foreground color, then it showed the foreground color. Transparent was transparent.
Around 1981/1982 I went to a computer shop to buy my first computer. There was a VIC-20 and a TI99/4A. The VIC-20 was cheaper, had more possible peripherals and more software. Annoyingly, the VIC20 cassette deck was bespoke and expensive, so the £200 price tag was really £250. Even so, I wisely chose the VIC-20 and so started my career in electronics and software. The VIC-20 still works to this day. It only broke down once and that was because one of my projects zapped a 6522.
30:24 - TI had an industrial controls division in Johnson City, Tennessee, which built controllers using the TMS9900 chip. One of the marketing limitations on the TI/99 computer was that it would not impact sales in that division. However, given the price difference (at least 20x), engineers who were already familiar with programming the TMS9900 adapted the TI/99 to their work, essentially scuttling the Johnson City products. I had a TI 9900 industrial single-board-computer in a research project I worked on at the University of Florida which took data off of a semiconductor test stand and uploaded the data to the mainframe. I wrote all of the code. I was very pleased with the 9900 memory-register-architecture and throught it had "legs"... silly me...
*Watches video define slide rule. Feels old.* Also yeah, the TI 99/4a was a nice little computer - had one myself. And actually still have my "Little Professor" sitting on a shelf. :)
The TI-99/4A was my first computer. It may have failed, but I wouldn't be where I am today without it. Its manual explaining BASIC was wonderful for this 12yo, and have made a career in the data industry as a result.
Actually the 99 /4A got down to $49 or $50. It had a fatal flaw: discontinuity with its cartridge plug in system. The programs would stop, & you had to pull the cartridge out & re-insert it. Apparently the problem was in some kind of pithy cleaning strip which held dirt, but f you did surgery to remove that strip, then the continuity disruptions stopped. The disruptions spoiled persons trying to learn programming with this computer. The other problem was putting the computer inside the keyboard & having an expansion box connected with a firehouse connector, which had the same discontinuity problems as the program cartridges had. The expansion boxes could have disk drives with programs on the disks, but the fire-hose connector discontinuity problem continued. IBM came out with a somewhat similar system, but the computer was not in the keyboard, but in a separate computer box which resembled the TI expansion box for the 99 4/A. As I ran a private school, I found ultimately I could buy the 99 4/A at flea markets for $5 each! and I used them mostly for math drills (add, subtract, multiple, divide). Eventually I owned something like 30 of these computers. A marketing problem was also discouraging to TI in making money on its game cartridges. For TI tended to make games that never ended, there were ever higher & higher skill levels one could rise to without ever finally winning, like with Parsec. It seems that other companies were smarter & made games that could be won eventually, causing the gamer to go buy a new game & stop playing the old one. - IMHO
27:01 I heard this legend before, but none of the several versions of Speak & Spell used magnetic bubble memories: they were extremely expensive, very slow and bulky. It used what TI called VSM (Voice Synthesis Memories) in this case that were two 128k PMOS serial ROMs. Texas deployed its first bubble memories in 1977 but they had only 92k.
The TI-99/4A was indeed superior in graphics, sound and memory to the VIC-20 ... but you had to buy expensive expansions to POKE. So the internals were hidden. Limited to BASIC, assembly was nigh impossible. This is why young hobbyists would much rather have a Japple, Orange, VIC-20 or such. Closed architecture always loses in the end.
Well, the Mini-Memory Module was available for some assembly language programming. I used one in conjunction with the Speech Synthesizer add-on and a CRU board I designed to make a UHF repeater controller for instance.
@@GnuReligion Ahhh . the Mini-mem had a line by line assembler, I had bought the full Editor/Assembler package and loaded ASM pgms into the MM Module so I didn't need the expansion chassis for my repeater controller application.
That was my first computer; got when I started high school. Even had the speech synthesizer unit. Learned programming with it, but moved to an Apple IIc, then, eventually, to PC's. I still have fond memories of that 99/4A.
TI 99/4A was my first home computer. In order to use the voice modulator , there needed to be a part needed. In order to get a discount on that part I ordered programs to get a discount towards the sound modulation kit. This $99 Radio Shack (Texas Instrument) key board ended up costing near $1,000 before I finally sold it and bought the newest desktop P.C. Oh, and I forgot to mention the memory needed a cassette tape player and recorder. It was able to be connected to a standard television of that year. It was lots of fun!
The TI-99/4a had nothing to do with Radio Shack. They didn't make it or sell it. All of the earliest home computers used cassette tape for storage, including the first IBM PC.
@@stargazer7644 Okay, I just remembered buying mine from a Radio Shack store that featured this computer one year. I thought for sure that it was a Tandy Company or Radio Shack. For each program cartridges, I also bought them from the same store that was then located on the town square in Nevada, Missouri. Either way, that does not matter. I still had lots of fun with this particular computer.
This was my first home computer in 1984 when it was already a fading product but still expensive these days. I remember Extended Basic, cassette recorder storage, lot of sprites but overall slow and limited, but laying my IT foundation.
I really appreciate how well researched and detailed this video is! (32:47) I would love it if you would do a video on how TI ran Commodore out of the calculator market and how Commodore eventually got their revenge with the 64.
The TI99 computer system failed for a lot of reasons. The TMS9900 cpu was a very capable processor, but it was limited by the external system design. There was only 256 bytes of 16 bit wide memory available to it. The rest of the advertised 16K ram resided on the other side of the video display chip where the cpu had to do tedious operations to access it. The 9918 video chip was remarkably good for the time, and the 76489 sound chip was pretty decent as well. But I think the biggest limitation besides the lack of useable memory was that the built in BASIC had no PEEK, POKE, or EXEC commands. You couldn't read or write addresses in memory. Your only option was to churn through a sluggish BASIC unless you bought expansion options.
Was supposed to have cut-down version of TMS-9900 CPU, the TMS9995. The 9995 was 16 bit bit but had 8 bit data lines. It wasn't ready so the TMS9900 was jammed in there instead. They hobbled the performance of the TI-99/4A as well as they didn't want it competing with their mini computers (that also use the 9900). The way RAM worked was very strange...
@@j.f.christ8421 Yeah the 9995 would have been much better. Only needed 5 volts, 40 pin package and had the clock generator built in. It found its way into the obscure Tomy Tutor. I actually have a TI99-4A and it's BASIC performance is abysmal. TI gave it a shot but it had no chance against other offerings from a practical usage standpoint.
The TMS-9900 would have been long term a dead-end anyway. The architecture only had 3 real register, the PC program counter, the status register and WP, the workspace register that points to the 16 16 bit register in memory. So each register access is a memory access.
@@galier2 Pretty much. It's an interesting architecture, but it didn't make much sense for a home computer. I guess they were too wrapped up in their minicomputer mindset. Very fast context switching though. They would have done much better with a simpler 8 bit cpu like a 6502 or Z80. That and they ended up basically making a cartridge console with a keyboard. The lack of efficient ram was a killing blow. They treated the VRAM as a Ram drive. The 9918 was a good video chip, but using it's memory was the biggest bottleneck.
My dad bought a 99-4/A for our family when it hit the $150 price point. We kept it for three days. In those three days, I had mastered pretty much everything that the BASIC programming language it came with could do, so my dad figured I needed something that was going to be more challenging. We ended up with an Atari 600XL instead, and then later the 800XL when 16K wasn't enough. I remember it being cool that I could change the character set to produce graphics. And I used that capability on the first day we had the computer, and I recreated Pac-Man in the first few hours we had it. But I do remember it being pretty slow.
@@stargazer7644 It's documented in the Houston Chronicle, Jan 2, 1990, Section B (Business), Pages 1 and 5, article titled "Whiz kid builds software firm." From page 5 of the article: "When he was in fifth grade, he received a Texas Instruments computer for Christmas. Before Christmas, his dad let him take it out of the box for a couple of nights. In short order, he wrote a Pac-Man game on the machine."
@@djp_video Sorry, but the Houston Chronicle archives search are turning up zilch (1985-present). I had a TI during this time. I learned its quirky basic and sprite graphics. You don't "master" anything in 3 days. Are you sure you didn't just type in a pacman program from a magazine?
Spreadsheets, yes! I remember one (for the mac?) that was ahead... you'd draw tables on a blank slate and address within each table. Rather than having different sheets under tabs, or having sections of a single sheet to contain input and output (and having to move them).
Good luck! I had 9 years with TI in the UK from 1997 to 2006. It was a great experience, and it gave me lots of opportunities for further career development.
I would love to see a TI vs Commodore calculator war video. Your work is always top notch, and your humor always perfectly dry. Thanks for your hard work.
tunnels of doom! you can still play it on the mess emulator but i think some dufe made a web version a ways back. best original music for any game of its time imho.
In 1984 the smartest kid ⌨😇 in my class owned one of these. The rich kids had BBC micros and the cool kids had C64s. The poor saps had Sinclair Spectrums! Computer demography classroom style!
The Achilles Heel of the TI was the keyboard. The 99/4 started with Chiclet keys, and the 4A upgraded, but squashed into the same case space, making it hard to type.
And no backspace key. WTF? Kind of like the Tandy 1000 keyboard with no backslash - on a machine that runs DOS where you need the \ key about a thousand times a day.
Jack Tramiel's bitter war with TI played a huge part in the home computer and videogame market crash of 1983/4. The biggest winners of this apocalyptic event were the Japanese (and Nintendo in particular), who like the mammals did 66 million years earlier inherited the spoils.
I'm not convinced by that statement. The 1983 crash is only a US thing, it did not happen in Europe. The cause of the crash is often attributed to the Atari 2600 getting opened to third party development without Atari's approval. Activision did it first and then everyone else wanted a piece of the action. The result was a flood of poor games and that caused consumers to lose faith in the console. That's why Nintendo had to make the NES not look like a games console and bungle Rob the robot with it.
@@6581punk You are right on both points, but they do not contradict my arguments. Most people outside of North America know that the computer and gaming crash of 1983/4 was primarily an North American event (albeit one with global consequences). At this time both Nintendo and initially Sega were building up a head of stream in Japan, while the market peaked in the PAL territories during 1983, before a more limited crash in 1984/5 that was followed with a recovery and renewed growth from 1986 onwards. The Commodore/TI/Atari price war, combined with a glut of poor quality and overproduced first-and-third party software (mainly but not exclusively made by those looking to jump on the gaming bandwagon in search of what they thought would be a quick and/or easy buck) caused the crash.
@@6581punk Atari had the 7800 ready to go in 1984. Had it launched in 1984, it would have likely sold millions before Nintendo had launched. Because of a takeover and internal politics the 7800 did not get launched until 1986 which was way too late. The 7800 had some GOOD launch games for it as well as backward compatibility with 2600 library.
I remember playing it on DOS, it was on one of those random cheap-ass shareware 5.25" diskettes you'd see at local computer shops. First text adventure I'd ever seen.
I had an TI SR-10. While only a 4 function with square root, it did have scientific notation. I also had the TI LCD watch with Tritium backlight. I had a long parade of TI calculators SR-56, SR-52, TI-58 and TI-59. I used the TI silent-700 thermal printer terminals for mainframe access. I still have a TI-74 BasiCalc with its thermal printer.
I bought an SR-50 in about the 1974 timeframe for use in school .. paid 150 US directly to TI via mail order ... still have it, and it works! A 3.7 V Li-Ion batt works perfect to power it, vs the usual three 1.2 NiCad cells in series ...
An intetesting video on TI's history. I used a TI 980B minicomputer in 1977. That was my first introduction to hex. The HP2100 Iwas familiar with at Measurex was octal, as were the Data General Nova minis I used later. I bought a Speak and Spell one Christmas for some friends, and have built projects around some of TI's more interesting chips. Their DSP chips were fun, if you liked assembly code. TI is still around, after all these years
I loved my TI/99. It was my first foray into programming and played some cool games. Star Trek was especially good. Having much it’s of its UI design taken from Wrath of Khan.
21:29 - I took the last sliderule class offered in my high school in 1974. At that time, hand-calculators, especially TI hand calculators, were just to easy to get and user.
With the current financial and economic situation around the world, I strongly believe that as smart citizens we should not rely solely on our wages, but rather look for more innovative ways to earn money.
Thinking of how difficult it is to get a job, I think it’s time people start investing and earning their own money, the heartache from job hunt is quite unbearable, I for one would prefer investment than getting myself worked up on seeking a job
Looking for ways to earn money daily is sometimes frustrating and is a pain in the ass, I couldn’t really keep it up, it’s exhausting 😔 job hunting is something that drains your physical and mental wellbeing, hoping to get response from people who got themselves employees already but still keeping your hopes high
Investing in Stocks, Forex and cryptocurrency is the wisest, it's a place where millionaires and future billionaires come to get inspired. If you've not been involved in any you're missing out. Most importantly If you know how to trade you can make a ton of money no matter where you find yourself
A slide rule is just two parallel logarithmic scales. Aligning two numbers to add in physical length results in multiplication viewable at a cursor mark, reading in reverse provides the equivalent division. Pilots up into the 1980's used a circular version of slide rule to calculate ground speed, distance, or estimate time. (by multiplying/dividing) These circular editions often had a vector calculator on the flip side to calculate ground speed based on windspeed and direction relative to the ground track. A line was drawn in pencil and rotated to determine the resultant vector. The deployment of GPS and the US military making it publicly available greatly changed how global navigation has been done since the 1990's.
High School between ‘79 - ‘82. I remember buying a slide rule from the student store and learning how to use it in Drafting Class. Was so proud when I grasped the concept. Even did a bit of Drafting after graduation, but it wasn’t to be. Banged around in Sales & Repair, IT CS & Tech Support, and finally landed in Hospital Pharmacy. But the mind that grasped the slide rule, and learning Basic on a TI-99/4 given to me by my Mom, served me well through multiple careers. Though I’m a Mac nerd now, I owe my interest in computers to Texas Instruments❣️
I have a TI 99/4A in my basement right now, in the original box. The only ROM I got for it was "Music Maker" (or something like that). The bulk storage medium was cassette tapes, using a cassette recorder that was able to use a start/stop mic switch. It was certainly good enough to learn BASIC on, but I kinda' preferred the Sinclair ZX81 that I had gotten before it.
I have very fond memories as a child of receiving my first home computer in 1983 being the TI-994A. My dad & I joined a big user group which had hundreds of members in its heyday and filled a community hall in inner Sydney. My mum admits to secretly playing “Munchman” (their PacMan rip off) when us kids went to school.
I still have mine, in the basement. 16k ram. cost me $500 in 1981. about $2400 today. Still have the cassettes. Couldn't afford the tape drive, it was another $400. lol.
I think everyone misses that GSI worked with quartz strands before Ti worked with transistors. I’ve seen a Ti branded twisted quartz gravitometer. And they even have a million pound block of lead at Lemmon Ave.
My first computer was a 99/4A, wasn't hugely popular here in the UK, had a lot of cheaper competition in the form of the Sinclair ZX81 and Spectrum. Loved using that machine though. Taught me basic programming as well as having some great games on cartridge. In amongst my collection I still have two TI LED display calculators, a basic model 1250 with memory and a TI 51-III programmable LED display. Despite both being clearly built down to a price point, they still work 47 years after being made with only a change in power supply for the 51-III.
Superb history video! The history of TI is quite interesting. I would love to see a video about the ****history of the electronic spreadsheet,**** a very important "killer app."
In 1973 I was in Sixth Grade in Sterling Heights Michigan. Our teacher, Mr Schutz, one day in October, showed up with a fascinating piece of technology: a Texas Instruments pocket calculator. We were astonished that such a small device could perform what our young minds perceived as complex division and multiplication calculations in less than a second. I realized watching this video today just how novel it was to be able to see a packet calculator back then. Calculators in class were banned throughout most of my school years until 1978-79, my senior year in high school. The Catholic high school allowed the TI-30 scientific calculators to be used in upper mathematics classes.
When I joined TI in 1973, calculators we were part of the semiconductor division, later it became the Consumer Products Division. The early Datamath calculator had 3 circuit boards and about 100 components, mostly to support the PMOS processor. They sold for around $165 at Nieman-Marcus. When I left TI 1978, we were building TI-1200 calculators at a rate of 75,000 per day and they were selling at check-out stands for $10. I designed production test equipment, it was a hell of a ride.
Assuming that you're not covered by any non-disclosure agreement 46 years later, do you have any thing to add? Any insights would be appreciated
Which fab did you work in?
@@grantd8629 I didn't work in a fab. I was hired to help set-up the calculator production in an old Cooks Department Store in Lubbock. TI had several small plants in Lubbock. Later we moved to the new big plant on the North side of Lubbock. I was able to escape and move back to the main group in Dallas just before Bucy moved the entire consumer products engineering to Lubbock. TI lost so many good engineers due to that forced move. I was drafted into the Corporate Engineering Center in Dallas where I spent two years.
@@ronmaximilian6953 When I joined in 1973, TI was run like a group of small companies, each cost center was a group of people with a mission. When J Fred Bucy took over, things changed a lot. I guess it needed to be done, but Consumer Products lost almost all of its engineering staff after the move to Lubbock.
I had a TI 59 programmable back in the day along with the printer. That thing was definitely the stud in science class. That's actually the first thing I ever owned that had a programmable memory with magnetic storage
I love how Commodore nearly failed and had to leave the calculator business due to TI vertically integrating and then made a computer that made TI lose money and leave the personal computer business
Jack Tramiel did it on purpose, he wanted revenge on TI. Once Commodore had bought MOS technologies they not only had control of the 6502 processor but also could make highly integrated custom chips for their computers. Business is war was what Jack used to say. The TI was an okay machine, definitely well built. The fact it was 16-bit was pretty much lost given the weird and limited architecture of the processor. Plus that made no difference until the video and sound capabilities shined.
@@6581punkit's kind of hard to call what Jack was doing "business" when his personal vendetta against TI was so strong it almost killed Commodore and resulted in major losses soon after due to an over-flooded market and price wars.
It's like Airbus vs Boeing, they are going to split their military and civilian activities...
TI is still around.... Commodore not so much
@@6581punk if you cross Jack Trammell he remembered. And sometimes your co-workers would pull back a bloody stump without a body attached
You lured me in with the title but then threw in the whole history of TI as well. Was really interesting!
Glad to see the clickbait title served a useful purpose
Same. Great info though but it was the last 10 minutes that we remember.
😂 When the 994 crashed the error message was "shut 'er down Clem, she's a pumpin' mud!" a nod to the oil field history of TI.
I love this little yellow sweet deer nigga lol 😂😂😂😂
I love this little yellow sweet deer nigga lol 😂😂😂😂
I love this little yellow sweet deer nigga lol 😂😂😂😂
Maybe that error wasn't in the 99/4A. Never got that message. Come to think of it, I don't remember it ever crashing.
@@ki5aokthe 99/4a could be crashed by pulling out the ROM cartridge, Oops I mean Solid-State Software module.
The screen would freeze, or get garbled, but the sprites kept moving, and the last note of music was stuck on, due to the DMA/Interrupt system still going.
I wouldn't say it failed! It made me the person I am today. Learned to program in Basic on that bad boy, when I was 10😂
same
Same, but I got it from a yard sale at that age around 1990 or 1991. Learned far more with it than I did the Mac Plus I got in 1994 (hand-me-down from another family)!
we had to start with something back then.
i can still hear "teach yourself basic" loading in my head. 😄
My dad loved his too.
My first computer and I never enjoyed anything as much since. I got it for Christmas in 1983, cost $50 at Kmart. People were lined up at the door for it's release. We all ran to the back of the store to get the limited supply and the people running knocked over a pallet of glasses, which shattered all over the floor in front of me. I was a scared 12 year old but I also thought it was pretty cool.
I loved it for gaming.
Parsec and Alpiner were amazing!
Same! Christmas ‘83, I was only 6 but my uncle waited in one of those lines to get one for me and my cousin. Man I miss that thing.
Same here. Got one for Christmas when it was $50, however it was actually released a few years earlier at a much higher price. I remember my uncle mentioning to me that he was not happy because he bought one for $900 a year or two before the big price drop to $50.
@@thumbsprain42Parsec made the best use of hardware speech synthesis on any consumer platform.
Oh yeah it was a great computer but wasn't really known for gaming though. Commodore was great for gaming as they were cheaper so had a larger customer base so developers started making games. The Vic 20 was great for game but it was really the 64 that turned it into a gaming monster. TI should have lowered the price.
The TI 99-4/A was my first computer. Dad picked one up in their fire sale and we occasionally found carts that would run on it. Despite the fact that it wasn't compatible with CompuServe, he still managed to get it to connect and get useable data out of it. I copied so many games out of magazines to tape and floppy… I don't miss how hard computers were back then, but sometimes I do.
Awesome. It was my first computer too. Used basic and began with a simple version of ‘life’. Aside from various games, there was a lot of competition for the only TV in the house, lol
C-64 was the unit that Quantumlink ran on which was the ancestor of AOL
When I worked at TI in the early 80s there was a group adapting Speak and Spell to a military application. We’d hear it saying things like “close the hatch” or “not ready” across the wall dividing our working area from theirs (I was also working military hardware). For their project my coworkers coined the name “Speak and Kill”.
I still have a working TI wristwatch that I have used recently. It’s losing time probably because the package housing the tuning fork timebase crystal has slowly admitted a bit of air. In the first year I owned it, though, it was accurate to within 7 seconds.
Great video! Thank you!
for many years, all I knew of Texas Instruments was that they made the very expensive graphing calculator that my grandpa saved and pinched his pension pennies to buy me as an early birthday present for the start of school when i was 14 - not because a graphing calculator was what i wanted most in the world for my birthday, but because having one was required in order to take the higher-level math courses in high school that i would need in order to get into a good college for sciences, and we were far far too poor for mom to have ever bought it along with my regular basic school supplies. crazy to learn all this history behind that one extremely expensive chunk of circuits which had all the adults in my family scratching their heads. i actually do remember my high school calculus teacher, who had been there since the school opened and was about three years from retirement, going off on a tangent once about how she remembered back when calculators first came out when she was a young brand-new teacher fresh out of college, and when she was our age, they had to do everything with slide rules. like you, i had no idea what a slide rule was or how it worked; i think in my head i pictured an abacus lol. great video jon!
I bet she was hot back then.
My father was a mechanical engineer, worked at Ford for 37 years. He personally witnessed the launch of the 69 Mustang in Edison, NJ.
Anyways, when I went off to engineering school in the '80s, he gave me his whole drafting table setup, protractors, symbol templates,French curve, scale rulers, and a slide rule.
I only ever used the drafting aids for quick sketches, where it would take Autocad longer to boot from the monstrous 20MB hard drive on my '286.
For the first 20 years of my career, I had the slide rule taped to the top front bezel of my desktop monitor.
It was ptouch labelled "BACKUP COMPUTER"
Had a ti99/4a when I was a kid. Learned a lot on that little thing. Saved paper route and birthday money to buy a used Apple II clone and moved on, but that little ti was my first computer, and it was great!
Loved its audio capability with real chords and a decent frequency range. Was it three tone channels and one noise channel? I remember using it as a 10kHz and 20kHz source to splatter my CB signal two channels above and below the one I was talking on. Music too, and hand digitized photography, but the radio splatter was the most fun.
Still miss the extended basic
my dad bought when I was a kid, loved to learn programming on and played a lot of games. I did not know it was a failure, still have good memories putting in a cassette tape when saved files. my dad bought a Apple IIc later, I was not a big fan of that one.
Did you buy a Laser?
I also had a TI99/4A. I would have never traded it for an Apple II with its garbage pasudo-color graphics, lack of sprites, beep
and bloop cruddy sound chip, and no speech synthesis. We had to use that trash in elementary school.
Bought one for the family for $99 when TI liquidated their stock. Paid $70 for Parsec the week before Christmas as they were super hard to get. Got the voice synthesizer, Extended BASIC Mini Memory Module cartridges and a bunch more. Bought ALL the Adventure International text adventures. I wound up using it more than my son. Learned to program on this little gem, which led to an enjoyable career in IT.
I had a lot of fun with Parsec.
Failed my ass. It was my first computer and I went on to get a BS in Computer Science. It was a landmark machine.
Narcissism detected
That was my sentiment. That computer made me switch what I wanted to do in life from meteorology to IT. Love to study weather. Love to program computers more.
The only problem with the 99/4 SERIES was they did not decode the full peripheral address, thus throwing away the lower bits.
3 things the TI 99/4 did that stood out to me. 1) Sprites 2)Speech (also in Speak and Spell) on a chip 3)GROM (brilliant. Load a start address, then simply clock out however many bytes you needed. Repeat )
The first 99/4 had a chicklet keyboard that bugged typists. The add on modules plugged into the side and were a pain to keep attached (I think they had no clue how popular they were going to be). A friend nailed strips on his desk to keep them inline. The 4A fixed the keyboard issue. A 'new' expansion chassis mostly handled the multiple card (module) issue (The cord was compatible with all 99/4 and had no retention solution, making moving the keyboard, still an issue/
@@steveurbach3093 You're right, they put a 16-bit processor on an 8-bit bus, which cut the processing power in half. Wasted potential.
I never played with a 99/4, only the 99/4A. It was initially for my parents, so they can do things like balance a checkbook, etc. They never actually used it...me being my 10-year old self, I hijacked it from them and started experimenting with the Basic programming language.
Such fond memories.
@@steveurbach3093My favorite piece of hw/sw (besides the Speech Synthesizer, of course) was the "Mini Memory" cartridge.
Had a neat little Monitor/ Assembler/Disassembler sw ROM on there, with a 4KB static RAM workspace which was..get this..Battery Backed-UP!
You could partition and label multiple memory spaces within the 4K, and the programs you stored there would show up on the Boot Screen:
[Press 1 for TI Basic]
[Press 2 for Your 1st Program]
[Press 3 for Your 2nd Program]
&c. &c.
Too bad TI committed consumer product seppuku by waging a price war with Jack Tramiel.
In global politics, rule 1 is, Don't get involved in a land war in Asia.
Rule 2 is, Don't get involved in a price war with Jack "The Commodore" Tramiel.
Really enjoyed this history lesson! I bought a TI 99/4A around '83 and loved it. Not the same machine, but I have a working model in my collection right now.
IIRC this was the computer you could use to mess with the neighbors garage doors and the dogs and other smaller mammals in the area. It could produce ultrasonic sounds and many garage door openers were simple, unencrypted, ultrasonic tones. When I was doing work towards an EE degree a few years later (early 90's) I knew classmate that had done just that a time or two in his early/mid teens.
Early computers were not very compliant with the regulations. In fact, the Apple 2 shipped without the RF port and it was your decision to fit the port. It was the only way it could be sold legally. I think someone used the Altair computer to make music by generating RF interference.
I don't exactly remember TI fondly. My generation (of Danes in the 2000's in highschool) was required to acquire a Ti30 calc which now is priced reasonably around $30 but back then cost around $150 and even more for higher than mandatory levels.
I love my little black TI-30 with its red digital display. Bought with money from my after school job at around 1978 when I started at Haslev Gymnasium 🇩🇰.
The TI-85 is as overpriced today as the day I was required to buy it.
Yeah, in the US, TI graphing calculators were mandatory, despite other brands being better sometimes
My first "real" calculator was a TI-51. Had all the trig functions and all that. Could also write a script of several repetitive steps. The problem I had with it was the key pad. I could press the key, and nothing would show up. Other times, I'd press a digit and get several of those digits. This made it hard to use in class when taking a test.
I didn't have much money in college, and that TI-55 had to get me through. The battery couldn't hold a charge, so I clearly remember (40+ years later), getting a seat in Thermo early, so I could find a seat along the wall where I could plug in to the outlet. That feels like yesterday. That calculator could have been nice, but it was torture to use.
I had to get a TI-83 in high school, about 25 years ago. It cost $100. The TI-83 Plus has dropped in price all the way down to... $80. I think the schools have since "upgraded" to the TI-84 Plus, which costs... I bet you can guess what it costs.
I'm 63. I learned to use my grandfather's slide rule somewhere around the age of 16 (second year of high school) when I first learned about logarithms. The primary purpose of a slide rule is to use logarithms to convert multiplication into addition and division into subtraction. The design of a slide rule makes it easy to find the logarithm of two numbers, add or subtract them, and read the resulting value with a reasonable degree of precision (assuming you have good vision).
I’m 79, and used a 10” slide rule during sporadic attempts at a university education in the 1960s. For chain calculations, the slide rule will whip a calculator’s butt. . . and an added benefit was that it taught one to be very aware of orders of magnitude in any calculation.
I still have that slide rule.
My dad used slide rules in his early career and bought an HP-35 scientific calculator in 74-ish for like $400, which was worth about $1600 in Y2K-dollars. I learned to use a circular slide rule “E6B” as a helicopter flight engineer in the early ‘90’s. I’m 53 now and enjoy collecting slide-rule type calculators.
The instrument that put men on the moon.
I had a ti-99, played the shit out if Parsec on that damn thing. had the cassette tape storage and everything
Kept crashing coming out of the refueling tunnels, till I finally wondered what "LIFT 3" on the screen meant. Eventually read the little game booklet, and immediately was embarrassed that I had been playing that game for the better part of a year completely unaware of the Lift options 🤦🏽♂
Parsec, Munchman, The Chisolm Trail, Hunt the Wumpus......good times.
One of the less appreciated aspects of the TI 99 story is that when TI decided to get out of the computer market, they put the 99/4 a on sale for far less than it was previously retailing for. My mother got one for me for $50 for Christmas when I was nine years old. It made it possible for me to discover computing at an early age. In the late 80s there was an aftermarket Renaissanceof of 99/4 a accessories. I was able to buy a printer and other software in high school and my mother actually wrote her masters thesis on our old 99/4A.
See! It failed!!
I got mine at a K Mart for $75- it's in my garage now.
@@rustywp we got it at Hills department store, a now long-defunct chain.
I worked at TI - they were dumping the 4A's by the pallet for $25 each. I still had to pay $300 each for the floppy and interface...
@@paulseymour6012 i always wanted the interface. I only ever had a cassette deck. I can still remember the sound.
Heck yeah I want a history of spreadsheets video!😁 My first spreadsheet was Lotus 1-2-3
another vote for spreadshit history! :)
Me too!
I loathe spreadsheets with a vengeance.
But yeah, let's see that video!
At 26:35 what you see isn't just a "Radio thingy" - it was the 9100 the first solid state LORAN-C navigation receiver for airplanes. It had a big improvement in performance and weight to the tube type navigation receivers and also had lots of features that the tube type competition couldn't touch.
I had a chance to work in the TI Marine Comm-Nav lab at TI on an associated project (GPS HDUE/MANPACK) at the time (1978) and they had purchased all the large LORAN-C competitors 'boxes' that required one to line up the 'pulses' Loran C used in order to compute position ... so TI had evaluated the market competition product back then.
Mine never failed. I've owned one since 83, and now own three, all of them in working order. I have several sidecars as well as a Peripheral Expansion Box with quite a few cards inside. My setup will even communicate with the internet, Brother typewriter, Panasonic dot matrix color printer, and my Raspberry Pi 4. I did have a keyboard issue once, but it was nothing a conductive pen could not fix. Long live TI and the TI-99/4 and 4a.
This was my second computer, after the Timex Sinclair with the membrane keyboard. The TI was my first introduction to BASIC programming, and I clearly remember the jumble of noise that it made when saving my little programs to an analog cassette tape. I don’t know what happened to that old thing, but I wish that I still had it today.
Sinclair made some good follow on computers that never showed up in the states.
Hey me too. TS-1000 was my first, TI-99/4A was next, then a Coleco Adam Clone before finally getting a "real" computer - a TRS-80 Model III. I still have my TS-1000.
It was quite the upgrade form a Sinclair! I was an Atari kid. Went through a few 800xl and 130 xe’s.
Hell yes we want a history of the spreadsheet!
Visicalc -> Lotus 1-2-3 -> Excel. That covers most of it. But yes, an Asianometry review of spreadsheets would be fun.
@@petervarley3078 : There's probably some other steps that we don't commonly think of as well. An interesting subject.
Sounds like it'd be an interesting watch :) I'm not interested enough to research it myself (lol) but I would very likely watch a video of it if they made one!
When the 64-bit version of Excel came out, with its vastly increased rows and columns, I asked the Microsoft Excel team at CES if they planned to upgrade its math calculator to be able to use multiple CPUs. They said they had no plans to do so. Excel was just so damned slow to improve the product. Large spreadsheets had glacial load times from hard drives. It still doesn't have an easy method to do math within the cell name call, so you have to do gymnastics with a lot of scenarios. And you always had to know all the workarounds to iterate calculus functions.
"You just woke up. everything is FUZZY. you hear an alarm clock ringing somewhere. you are in BED. you can't see anything."
Get out of bed, turn on the light
Find Glasses
@greywane years later my friend with glasses told me: "squint"!
🤦♂️
Played it a few months ago again. Glad the BBC still has it up, for free!
I got that computer in my room as i write this comment. clicked the video cause i recognized that machine. It was given to me by the old man who ran the place that had it. Was bought back in the day for a recreation center for people who were done with school but had to go to a center to do stuff till parents got home from work
So want to play any of the funky dragon mix? Or maybe "Computer Math Games II" ?I got all the accessories the center had bought for it and it still works
Check out that power-supply transformer though !
I'll admit. It's a giant f-ing square brick whenever i look at it XD@@petergibson2318
Also from that era: Mattel Electronics' personal home computer Aquarius! It had the second worst keyboard, gummy little chiclet keys. The worst was the Timex/Sinclair 1000.
Hey! I had a TI-99/4. My mother bought it from a coworker in 80/81. Wrote my first Basic programs with color graphics with it. So cool!
Back in the 80ies my father used slide rules to calculate the operational parameters of nuclear reactors he was working with in USSR, Bulgaria and Hungary. It was a wide-spread tool, since electronic calculators were way too expensive for "common" engineers.
When I was in 6th grade (we're talking 1993-1994), my teacher actually taught us how to use slide rules! I think she was trying to prepare us for a future of using them... but... we were already ten-plus years into the computer revolution. Her heart was in the right place, tho, and I ended up buying a few slide rules over the years because of how fondly I remembered that lesson. :D
Entire Mercury and Apollo programs calculations were double checked using slide calculators, as computers were still new thing and not fully trusted. And im pretty sure Soviet engineers used them aswell, as computers were...none.
It wasn't until after HS that calculators came out, so I had learned on slide rules!
Hard to believe that we made it to the Moon, using slide rules for all the engineering along the way.
I had several slide rules of different sizes and even a circular slide rule that fit in a shirt pocket!! It was pretty cool because of its compact size. I guess it was a precursor to the pocket calculator.
@Turnipstalk No, not really.
@Turnipstalk Slide rules were much better than "approximations". 3 decimal precision was pretty common. Yes, human "computers", (not "human calculators"), were used and many calculations used existing scientific tables developed by human computers'.
But the real key to necessary precision is largely tied to how precisely you could easily measure! That in turn was how precisely you could make something. 1/1000th of a unit was considered pretty accurate and in a practical sense, better precision was not really usable.
Often, even the calculations made by computers is in a way an "approximation" because we have things repeating or recurring decimals and prime numbers. Early computers were pretty limited in the size of numbers they could handle.
In the end the degree of precision needed is limited by what you can practically use. Anything more accurate is just overkill if you can't really use it.
TI's failure in home computers really showed in the UK which was the most competitive in the world at the time with a vast number of domestic designs competing with imports. The 994 was invisible but Commodore's offerings competed successfully with Acorn, Sinclair, etc..
The TI99/4 was £990 on release in the UK. Atari 800 was cheaper and better (same release year). People's first computer was often a cheaper one as they didn't quite know if they really needed one. Some people with lots of money of course went into whole heartedly and bought an Apple 2, BBC Micro etc.
TI’s TI-990 series mini computers sold quite well. It was TI marketing’s fault that the microcomputer was hamstrung with only 256 bytes of directly attached RAM (all the rest was attached to the TMS9918 video controller and accessed by slow port read/writes) as they didn’t want it to compete with their lucrative mini sales.
The TMS9900 wasn’t the device that was late to the party, the microcomputer was originally intended to use the planned TMS9995 microprocessor, which had the RAM onboard and an 8 bit data bus. Because this was very late they shipped the machine with the TMS9900, which required a complex 4 phase clock, multiple power rails, 16 bit support components etc.
Yes. The 9995 would have been better. The memory based register architecture that the family used really needed the speed of on-chip RAM. It's why the TI99/4A ended up using a pair of 6810 ram chips for the workspace registers. Putting the main storage on the 9918 video processor gave a double penalty of only 8 bit accesses and much slower access times. Also, the processor family had a weird serialised I/O architecture known as the CRU (or Communications Register Unit). This was great for reducing pin count on peripheral chips (9902 UART was only 18 pins for example), but it also meant I/O accesses for some peripherals were so much slower than the competition. I worked with 9900 and designed hardware around the later 99105 in the 1980s. Fun days!
Getting the Mini Memory Module and it's 4K of CPU addressable RAM was a revelation, as was learning 9900 assembler. The performance was there but the base system hid it away.
I used a 99/4a as a 440 MHz repeater controller for a number of years ... using the speech synthesizer to make announcements and a CRU interface card I designed (using TTL address decoders and the 9334 8 bit addressable latch for I/O) that plugged into the expansion port on the right side ...
@@stevewausaI learned assembly on my 99/4a with expansion box and 32k memory card. It was very capable.
@@stevewausa Thanks for mentioning that. I had one of those for my 9/4A, and I've been reading down the comments hoping somebody would mention it to remind me of the name. Had a blast with assembly language with that little guy.
On the contrary, The Speak & Spell was widely popular and was indeed the first tablet. What? It had a keyboard, a display, a true processor, ROM, an expansion port, and an OS.
Speak and spell had pretty much two applications. Don't get me wrong, I had one and loved it as a kid.
Starting the "Say it" lesson flustered the teacher as she attempted to stop it from loudly speaking and disrupting the classroom.
And early AI
OMG I HAD ONE AS A LITTLE KID!!! (in the early 90s!!) I CAN STILL REMEMBER THE MALE VOICE AND THE LITTLE MENU TONES!
it had a two row 2x8 character dot matrix display,
Man......
@@ronmaximilian6953 Spell, and, uh... what was the other one?
I was taught to use a slide rule in 1986 (long after calculators had taken over). It was a requirement to join the Royal
Navy as an artificer at the time and the head of mathematics taught meet during a 2 hour detention period he was overseeing
The guys on detention sat mesmerised as I sat with the teacher going through it all (and to be fair they said to me later they couldn’t believe I understood it all)
Oh I had a VIC-20 too
As a millennial, the main thing we knew of Texas Instruments was the TI-83 Plus calculator, that everyone was REQUIRED to buy in high school
I wanted a 99/4 in the worst way, especially when the price went down. In the end I held off for a computer that had development tools and a compiler at a reasonable price. A Zenith clone and Turbo Pascal finally made that click and served until Linux became available. And I do know how to operate a slide rule, calculators didn't become cost effective until I was out of school.
The TI was my computer between the ZX81 and Coleco ADAM. We had a knack for getting the wrong system for the time. I went on to side with the TurboGrafx-16 over Genesis and MiniDisc over MP3.
Ooof!
Did you buy a Betamax instead of VHS as well? 🤣
@@pauligrossinoz lol no! VHS all the way. I didn't start buying bb Betamax machines til recently!
Wow, I also started with the Timex Sinclair 1000, went to the TI-99/4a, then got a Coleco ADAM (Gotta love those tape drives and noisy daisy wheel printer). Honestly the Sinclair was the best computer to learn on of that bunch, even with how limited it was. I went TRS-80 after that, then into PCs in 1987.
Thanks for the series of brilliant synopsys of different IT/science videos.
Re the slide rile, they are just analogue computers, simple to use.
My first college electrinics/matamatics/science teacher, an ex UK RAF engineer gave us two good bits of advice, 1 volunteer to do things if you are able and secondly use a slide rule on complex exam papers the slide rule will give you the close approximat answer to the exam question.
I still have several Faber-Castell and others.
Unfortunately, the last were made from plastic, not wood, metal, and glass, as the early were made and the plastic has degraded and distorted.
Thanks again
History of Spreadsheets? Very much Yes!!
I owned a TI-99/4A back in the day. You could hook it up to a TV but the resolution was atrocious. One thing it was superb at was the Space Invaders game which came standard with it. It was exactly like the original. I enjoyed many hours playing it.
It was the only video games I had when I was a kid. I can’t remember the names of those cartridge games but I had five or six in total. I remember a game with cactus 🌵 and timed blocks you had to shoot with your little ship before aliens hatched. At least I think that’s how it worked, so long ago i barely remember. I learned to type on a typing game on there. So cool to see this video, memories! 😃👍🏻
My first consulting job out of school was to prototype a 9900 based cpu board, memory board, and test fixture. All wire wrap. It worked.
4:54 - That plane is the venerable P-3 Orion. The stinger tail is where the magnetometer lives. My first cousin was an avionics engineer for that aircraft.
When I worked in Mountain View, CA, those planes flew over our office building several times per day, flying out of Moffett Field, out over the Bay, and back again. To this day, I don't know if they were training flights, actual patrols, or a little of each.
The other plane we saw a lot was the C-130 Hercules. Although about 30% larger than the P-3, its high wing was the most obvious difference.
The TI-99 4/A was my first home computer. I loved it! I taught myself programming in the BASIC language at age 14, just in time to be one of the first students at my high school to attend the new computer classes (featuring Apple computers).
Today I am a well-compensated software engineer who has worked in NYC, Austin, TX, and Silicon Valley. The "failed" Texas Instruments computer was an important part of my successful career.
My father purchased one of the second gen. scientific calculators, bought sometime around mid-1970’s. Still has it, and it still works flawlessly.
First machine I learned how to code on. 2 sprites , collisions control , and joystick control , 20 lines of code .
This video brought back major memories. I remember having a Speak & Spell, but I had completely forgotten about my Little Professor Calculator. As soon as I saw it on the screen, though I'm now 48, I could feel the buttons under my fingers! Later I had a TI-99, but I don't remember much about it except that we owned it and it had a cassette drive peripheral in addition to the cartridge slot. We probably only had it a few months when I set a massive magnet on the top of it, right where the ventilation grille is above the cartridge slot. It immediately (and mysteriously) went TU, and to this day I've never told that story to my parents. I feel guilty even now at the amount of money that went down the drain that day.
The TI-99/4A was my first computer. I was extremely late (early ‘90s) since it was a yard sale find but I learned to code BASIC on it. ;) It was WAY more helpful than the hand-me-down Mac Plus I got from another family in church (1994). We literally had to upgrade to a high-density floppy drive just to install Word Perfect.
Saving your program to a casette tape was fun. It was my first computer and where i learned my first coding language, BASIC.
Same thing on my first IBM PC. Installed floppies later on, learned to program C
The TMS-9900 processor was an incredibly-powerful 16-bit processor with 16 general-purpose workspace registers. However, there were many architectural design mistakes that led to frustration among TI computer users. The base configuration had almost NO CPU memory (just 256 bytes, or 128 16-bit words at >8300). All memory was "VDP" or video memory, which was slow, serially-accessed 8-bit memory that required writing the address first then reading a stream of bytes. The BASIC interpreter was mostly double-interpreted, using an 8-bit machine-language called GDP (documented in TI 99-4A INTERN), making it extremely slow. (Also, floating point numbers were implemented in base-100, making display relatively quick but calculations slow.) Writing machine-language (assembly-language) was not particularly inviting or easy for new users, since you had to buy an expensive 32KB memory expansion module (or a cheaper 4KB Mini-Memory cartridge) and a Peripheral Expansion Box to put it into, before you could even run machine code. (Cartridge games were typically 8KB and ran directly from ROM, so they didn't need expansion memory to run machine code.) TI's decision to try to monopolize the software market for their own computer was a major reason for their failure, as I see it.
I disagree that the 9900 was powerful. It actually had no internal general purpose registers, rather it used the first 16 words of ram as register locations. This made the logic simple but execution slow. It's been over 45 years since I had my single-board 9900 so I don't remember much about the architecture but the registers I do recall.
@@garymartin9777 Sure, that was a factor, limiting speed to maybe 200k to 500k ops/sec at 3mhz, but double-interpretation of BASIC, encoded in GPL bytecode, was a far bigger factor. I'm just saying, with the VDP processor (for sprites) and other features, the hardware was actually pretty good for its day for assembly-language coding (compared to, for example, 6502.) But lack of a true stack was disappointing, to me, as it makes implementation of recursion and higher-level languages and compilers more difficult.
My best friend got a 99/4A for Christmas and the two of us typed in a lot of the demonstration programs in the manual. I was so excited to see what "transparent" was going to look like, because my C64 didn't have that color... and then we realized it's just what every other computer called the "background color."
But it was only the background color if that pixel was over the background. If it was over a foreground color, then it showed the foreground color. Transparent was transparent.
This computer is the first one I was free to play with, and typed my first efforts at programming into. I will always have a soft spot for it.
Around 1981/1982 I went to a computer shop to buy my first computer. There was a VIC-20 and a TI99/4A. The VIC-20 was cheaper, had more possible peripherals and more software. Annoyingly, the VIC20 cassette deck was bespoke and expensive, so the £200 price tag was really £250. Even so, I wisely chose the VIC-20 and so started my career in electronics and software. The VIC-20 still works to this day. It only broke down once and that was because one of my projects zapped a 6522.
Then they made a guided anti-tank weapon, it didn't fail :D
I love this little yellow sweet deer nigga lol 😂😂😂😂
Did it know where it wasn’t?
@@RyJones I love this little yellow sweet deer nigga lol 😂😂😂😂
@@RyJonesOnly if the position where it is is the position where it wasn't.
I read something today TI is still operating in Russia.
30:24 - TI had an industrial controls division in Johnson City, Tennessee, which built controllers using the TMS9900 chip. One of the marketing limitations on the TI/99 computer was that it would not impact sales in that division. However, given the price difference (at least 20x), engineers who were already familiar with programming the TMS9900 adapted the TI/99 to their work, essentially scuttling the Johnson City products. I had a TI 9900 industrial single-board-computer in a research project I worked on at the University of Florida which took data off of a semiconductor test stand and uploaded the data to the mainframe. I wrote all of the code. I was very pleased with the 9900 memory-register-architecture and throught it had "legs"... silly me...
*Watches video define slide rule. Feels old.* Also yeah, the TI 99/4a was a nice little computer - had one myself. And actually still have my "Little Professor" sitting on a shelf. :)
I wish I still had mine. I had forgotten I even had one until I saw it on this video. 😂❤
The TI-99/4A was my first computer. It may have failed, but I wouldn't be where I am today without it. Its manual explaining BASIC was wonderful for this 12yo, and have made a career in the data industry as a result.
Actually the 99 /4A got down to $49 or $50. It had a fatal flaw: discontinuity with its cartridge plug in system. The programs would stop, & you had to pull the cartridge out & re-insert it. Apparently the problem was in some kind of pithy cleaning strip which held dirt, but f you did surgery to remove that strip, then the continuity disruptions stopped. The disruptions spoiled persons trying to learn programming with this computer. The other problem was putting the computer inside the keyboard & having an expansion box connected with a firehouse connector, which had the same discontinuity problems as the program cartridges had. The expansion boxes could have disk drives with programs on the disks, but the fire-hose connector discontinuity problem continued. IBM came out with a somewhat similar system, but the computer was not in the keyboard, but in a separate computer box which resembled the TI expansion box for the 99 4/A. As I ran a private school, I found ultimately I could buy the 99 4/A at flea markets for $5 each! and I used them mostly for math drills (add, subtract, multiple, divide). Eventually I owned something like 30 of these computers. A marketing problem was also discouraging to TI in making money on its game cartridges. For TI tended to make games that never ended, there were ever higher & higher skill levels one could rise to without ever finally winning, like with Parsec. It seems that other companies were smarter & made games that could be won eventually, causing the gamer to go buy a new game & stop playing the old one. - IMHO
Firehose? They were card edge connectors, and you can't wiggle them or it'll hang on you.
27:01 I heard this legend before, but none of the several versions of Speak & Spell used magnetic bubble memories: they were extremely expensive, very slow and bulky. It used what TI called VSM (Voice Synthesis Memories) in this case that were two 128k PMOS serial ROMs. Texas deployed its first bubble memories in 1977 but they had only 92k.
The TI-99/4A was indeed superior in graphics, sound and memory to the VIC-20 ... but you had to buy expensive expansions to POKE. So the internals were hidden. Limited to BASIC, assembly was nigh impossible. This is why young hobbyists would much rather have a Japple, Orange, VIC-20 or such. Closed architecture always loses in the end.
not impossible for some of us.
Well, the Mini-Memory Module was available for some assembly language programming. I used one in conjunction with the Speech Synthesizer add-on and a CRU board I designed to make a UHF repeater controller for instance.
@@uploadJ Ah yes, I wanted one of these. Gives you the commands: PEEK, PEEKV, POKEY.
there were other programming languages available
@@GnuReligion Ahhh . the Mini-mem had a line by line assembler, I had bought the full Editor/Assembler package and loaded ASM pgms into the MM Module so I didn't need the expansion chassis for my repeater controller application.
That was my first computer; got when I started high school. Even had the speech synthesizer unit. Learned programming with it, but moved to an Apple IIc, then, eventually, to PC's. I still have fond memories of that 99/4A.
Error at 7:54. Point contact transistor is a bipolar transistor too.
These reviews of the electronics industry history are simply fantastic. Congratulations! Keep it up. We need to give credit where it is due.
TI 99 was quite successful for it's time, your wonderful 20/20 historical insights don't change the actual history
Let me guess, you were a marketing executive for TI in the early 80s? 😂
Better teacher than my electronics professor in 9 minutes if that last point checks out
TI 99/4A was my first home computer. In order to use the voice modulator , there needed to be a part needed. In order to get a discount on that part I ordered programs to get a discount towards the sound modulation kit. This $99 Radio Shack (Texas Instrument) key board ended up costing near $1,000 before I finally sold it and bought the newest desktop P.C. Oh, and I forgot to mention the memory needed a cassette tape player and recorder. It was able to be connected to a standard television of that year. It was lots of fun!
The TI-99/4a had nothing to do with Radio Shack. They didn't make it or sell it. All of the earliest home computers used cassette tape for storage, including the first IBM PC.
@@stargazer7644 Okay, I just remembered buying mine from a Radio Shack store that featured this computer one year. I thought for sure that it was a Tandy Company or Radio Shack. For each program cartridges, I also bought them from the same store that was then located on the town square in Nevada, Missouri. Either way, that does not matter. I still had lots of fun with this particular computer.
@@Head2ToeTheatrical It was more likely to be a K-Mart.
This was my first home computer in 1984 when it was already a fading product but still expensive these days. I remember Extended Basic, cassette recorder storage, lot of sprites but overall slow and limited, but laying my IT foundation.
Germanium transistors are less reliable, but their fuzzfaces sound better than silicon ones.
“Better” is more like it, it’s debatable. They’re also prone to changes in ambient temperature unlike others.
I really appreciate how well researched and detailed this video is! (32:47) I would love it if you would do a video on how TI ran Commodore out of the calculator market and how Commodore eventually got their revenge with the 64.
The TI99 computer system failed for a lot of reasons. The TMS9900 cpu was a very capable processor, but it was limited by the external system design. There was only 256 bytes of 16 bit wide memory available to it. The rest of the advertised 16K ram resided on the other side of the video display chip where the cpu had to do tedious operations to access it. The 9918 video chip was remarkably good for the time, and the 76489 sound chip was pretty decent as well. But I think the biggest limitation besides the lack of useable memory was that the built in BASIC had no PEEK, POKE, or EXEC commands. You couldn't read or write addresses in memory. Your only option was to churn through a sluggish BASIC unless you bought expansion options.
Was supposed to have cut-down version of TMS-9900 CPU, the TMS9995. The 9995 was 16 bit bit but had 8 bit data lines. It wasn't ready so the TMS9900 was jammed in there instead. They hobbled the performance of the TI-99/4A as well as they didn't want it competing with their mini computers (that also use the 9900).
The way RAM worked was very strange...
@@j.f.christ8421 Yeah the 9995 would have been much better. Only needed 5 volts, 40 pin package and had the clock generator built in. It found its way into the obscure Tomy Tutor. I actually have a TI99-4A and it's BASIC performance is abysmal. TI gave it a shot but it had no chance against other offerings from a practical usage standpoint.
The TMS-9900 would have been long term a dead-end anyway. The architecture only had 3 real register, the PC program counter, the status register and WP, the workspace register that points to the 16 16 bit register in memory. So each register access is a memory access.
@@galier2 Pretty much. It's an interesting architecture, but it didn't make much sense for a home computer. I guess they were too wrapped up in their minicomputer mindset. Very fast context switching though. They would have done much better with a simpler 8 bit cpu like a 6502 or Z80. That and they ended up basically making a cartridge console with a keyboard. The lack of efficient ram was a killing blow. They treated the VRAM as a Ram drive. The 9918 was a good video chip, but using it's memory was the biggest bottleneck.
Another thing this is the first computer that had speech synthesis on it there was no commodore that could do that.
My dad bought a 99-4/A for our family when it hit the $150 price point. We kept it for three days. In those three days, I had mastered pretty much everything that the BASIC programming language it came with could do, so my dad figured I needed something that was going to be more challenging. We ended up with an Atari 600XL instead, and then later the 800XL when 16K wasn't enough.
I remember it being cool that I could change the character set to produce graphics. And I used that capability on the first day we had the computer, and I recreated Pac-Man in the first few hours we had it. But I do remember it being pretty slow.
Sure. Cool story bruh.
@@stargazer7644 It's documented in the Houston Chronicle, Jan 2, 1990, Section B (Business), Pages 1 and 5, article titled "Whiz kid builds software firm."
From page 5 of the article: "When he was in fifth grade, he received a Texas Instruments computer for Christmas. Before Christmas, his dad let him take it out of the box for a couple of nights. In short order, he wrote a Pac-Man game on the machine."
@@djp_video Sorry, but the Houston Chronicle archives search are turning up zilch (1985-present). I had a TI during this time. I learned its quirky basic and sprite graphics. You don't "master" anything in 3 days. Are you sure you didn't just type in a pacman program from a magazine?
@@stargazer7644 I found the article on Genealogy Bank. But you do have to sign up for a trial to get to it.
Spreadsheets, yes! I remember one (for the mac?) that was ahead... you'd draw tables on a blank slate and address within each table. Rather than having different sheets under tabs, or having sections of a single sheet to contain input and output (and having to move them).
A company with such a decorated history. So happy I'll be joining TI this year!
Good luck! I had 9 years with TI in the UK from 1997 to 2006. It was a great experience, and it gave me lots of opportunities for further career development.
I would love to see a TI vs Commodore calculator war video. Your work is always top notch, and your humor always perfectly dry. Thanks for your hard work.
Spent many a weekend playing Tunnels And Trolls on a TI99.
I love this little yellow sweet deer nigga lol 😂😂😂😂
tunnels of doom! you can still play it on the mess emulator but i think some dufe made a web version a ways back. best original music for any game of its time imho.
@@zotfotpiq Ah yes, Tunnels of Doom thanks.
Great work, as ever!
28:10 - History of the Spreadsheet, please!
In 1984 the smartest kid ⌨😇 in my class owned one of these. The rich kids had BBC micros and the cool kids had C64s. The poor saps had Sinclair Spectrums!
Computer demography classroom style!
The Achilles Heel of the TI was the keyboard. The 99/4 started with Chiclet keys, and the 4A upgraded, but squashed into the same case space, making it hard to type.
the 4A keyboard was know as the "IBM Selectric" style
And no backspace key. WTF? Kind of like the Tandy 1000 keyboard with no backslash - on a machine that runs DOS where you need the \ key about a thousand times a day.
Jack Tramiel's bitter war with TI played a huge part in the home computer and videogame market crash of 1983/4. The biggest winners of this apocalyptic event were the Japanese (and Nintendo in particular), who like the mammals did 66 million years earlier inherited the spoils.
I love this little yellow sweet deer nigga lol 😂😂😂😂
I'm not convinced by that statement. The 1983 crash is only a US thing, it did not happen in Europe. The cause of the crash is often attributed to the Atari 2600 getting opened to third party development without Atari's approval. Activision did it first and then everyone else wanted a piece of the action. The result was a flood of poor games and that caused consumers to lose faith in the console. That's why Nintendo had to make the NES not look like a games console and bungle Rob the robot with it.
@@6581punk You are right on both points, but they do not contradict my arguments. Most people outside of North America know that the computer and gaming crash of 1983/4 was primarily an North American event (albeit one with global consequences). At this time both Nintendo and initially Sega were building up a head of stream in Japan, while the market peaked in the PAL territories during 1983, before a more limited crash in 1984/5 that was followed with a recovery and renewed growth from 1986 onwards.
The Commodore/TI/Atari price war, combined with a glut of poor quality and overproduced first-and-third party software (mainly but not exclusively made by those looking to jump on the gaming bandwagon in search of what they thought would be a quick and/or easy buck) caused the crash.
@@6581punk Atari had the 7800 ready to go in 1984. Had it launched in 1984, it would have likely sold millions before Nintendo had launched. Because of a takeover and internal politics the 7800 did not get launched until 1986 which was way too late. The 7800 had some GOOD launch games for it as well as backward compatibility with 2600 library.
8:15 Correction: the emitter-collector current in a BJT is controlled by the small *current* flowing through its base, not by the voltage applied.
Hunt the Wumpus on cassette , so frustrating yet still addictive
I remember playing it on DOS, it was on one of those random cheap-ass shareware 5.25" diskettes you'd see at local computer shops. First text adventure I'd ever seen.
Cassette? Pah, luxury! When I was your age, we had to load our Ti 99/4a programs off wax cylinder. And we were grateful to have it _that_ good!
@@JohnVance FYI, hunt the wumpus on dos and unix is text, but on the TI-99/4A it had a curious interface. It's worth checking out.
@@jsrodmanOh interesting, I will!
I had an TI SR-10. While only a 4 function with square root, it did have scientific notation. I also had the TI LCD watch with Tritium backlight. I had a long parade of TI calculators SR-56, SR-52, TI-58 and TI-59. I used the TI silent-700 thermal printer terminals for mainframe access. I still have a TI-74 BasiCalc with its thermal printer.
I bought an SR-50 in about the 1974 timeframe for use in school .. paid 150 US directly to TI via mail order ... still have it, and it works! A 3.7 V Li-Ion batt works perfect to power it, vs the usual three 1.2 NiCad cells in series ...
I'll vote for a VisiCalc video. MOS Technology and the 6502 would be a good one, too.
Small correction at 30:01 The 8088 was an 8bit processor (8 bit data bus / 20 bit address but) although it had an internal 16- bit architecture
Yep, we want the history of the spreadsheet.
An intetesting video on TI's history. I used a TI 980B minicomputer in 1977. That was my first introduction to hex. The HP2100 Iwas familiar with at Measurex was octal, as were the Data General Nova minis I used later. I bought a Speak and Spell one Christmas for some friends, and have built projects around some of TI's more interesting chips. Their DSP chips were fun, if you liked assembly code. TI is still around, after all these years
I loved my TI/99. It was my first foray into programming and played some cool games. Star Trek was especially good. Having much it’s of its UI design taken from Wrath of Khan.
21:29 - I took the last sliderule class offered in my high school in 1974. At that time, hand-calculators, especially TI hand calculators, were just to easy to get and user.
Yes I want a history of the spreadsheet so you can talk about the spreadsheet Olympics. 😊😊😊😊
8:14 : "... a larger current flowing through from the emitter to the collector". Isn't it the other way around (on NPN BJT) hence their names ?
With the current financial and economic situation around the world, I strongly believe that as smart citizens we should not rely solely on our wages, but rather look for more innovative ways to earn money.
Thinking of how difficult it is to get a job, I think it’s time people start investing and earning their own money, the heartache from job hunt is quite unbearable, I for one would prefer investment than getting myself worked up on seeking a job
Looking for ways to earn money daily is sometimes frustrating and is a pain in the ass, I couldn’t really keep it up, it’s exhausting 😔 job hunting is something that drains your physical and mental wellbeing, hoping to get response from people who got themselves employees already but still keeping your hopes high
Investing in Stocks, Forex and cryptocurrency is the wisest, it's a place where millionaires and future billionaires come to get inspired. If you've not been involved in any you're missing out. Most importantly If you know how to trade you can make a ton of money no matter where you find yourself
Exactly and many of us don't know where to invest our money so we invest it on wrong place and to the wrong people
Obviously talking about successful investment, I know I am blessed if not I wouldn't have met someone who is as spectacular as mrs ava Kimberly
Parsec "Great shot pilot!" TI Basic got me started in computers, the instructions were great.
A slide rule is just two parallel logarithmic scales. Aligning two numbers to add in physical length results in multiplication viewable at a cursor mark, reading in reverse provides the equivalent division.
Pilots up into the 1980's used a circular version of slide rule to calculate ground speed, distance, or estimate time. (by multiplying/dividing) These circular editions often had a vector calculator on the flip side to calculate ground speed based on windspeed and direction relative to the ground track. A line was drawn in pencil and rotated to determine the resultant vector.
The deployment of GPS and the US military making it publicly available greatly changed how global navigation has been done since the 1990's.
High School between ‘79 - ‘82. I remember buying a slide rule from the student store and learning how to use it in Drafting Class. Was so proud when I grasped the concept. Even did a bit of Drafting after graduation, but it wasn’t to be.
Banged around in Sales & Repair, IT CS & Tech Support, and finally landed in Hospital Pharmacy. But the mind that grasped the slide rule, and learning Basic on a TI-99/4 given to me by my Mom, served me well through multiple careers. Though I’m a Mac nerd now, I owe my interest in computers to Texas Instruments❣️
I have a TI 99/4A in my basement right now, in the original box. The only ROM I got for it was "Music Maker" (or something like that). The bulk storage medium was cassette tapes, using a cassette recorder that was able to use a start/stop mic switch. It was certainly good enough to learn BASIC on, but I kinda' preferred the Sinclair ZX81 that I had gotten before it.
I have very fond memories as a child of receiving my first home computer in 1983 being the TI-994A. My dad & I joined a big user group which had hundreds of members in its heyday and filled a community hall in inner Sydney.
My mum admits to secretly playing “Munchman” (their PacMan rip off) when us kids went to school.
I still have mine, in the basement. 16k ram. cost me $500 in 1981. about $2400 today. Still have the cassettes. Couldn't afford the tape drive, it was another $400. lol.
I think everyone misses that GSI worked with quartz strands before Ti worked with transistors. I’ve seen a Ti branded twisted quartz gravitometer. And they even have a million pound block of lead at Lemmon Ave.
My first computer was a 99/4A, wasn't hugely popular here in the UK, had a lot of cheaper competition in the form of the Sinclair ZX81 and Spectrum. Loved using that machine though. Taught me basic programming as well as having some great games on cartridge.
In amongst my collection I still have two TI LED display calculators, a basic model 1250 with memory and a TI 51-III programmable LED display. Despite both being clearly built down to a price point, they still work 47 years after being made with only a change in power supply for the 51-III.
27:02 - And was featured in the movie "E.T." and significant to the narrative feature "E.T. phone home!"...
Superb history video! The history of TI is quite interesting. I would love to see a video about the ****history of the electronic spreadsheet,**** a very important "killer app."
In 1973 I was in Sixth Grade in Sterling Heights Michigan. Our teacher, Mr Schutz, one day in October, showed up with a fascinating piece of technology: a Texas Instruments pocket calculator. We were astonished that such a small device could perform what our young minds perceived as complex division and multiplication calculations in less than a second.
I realized watching this video today just how novel it was to be able to see a packet calculator back then. Calculators in class were banned throughout most of my school years until 1978-79, my senior year in high school. The Catholic high school allowed the TI-30 scientific calculators to be used in upper mathematics classes.