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😂
@optimath4665 ай бұрын
same
@emmettturner94525 ай бұрын
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)!
@ratmadness48585 ай бұрын
we had to start with something back then.
@zotfotpiq5 ай бұрын
i can still hear "teach yourself basic" loading in my head. 😄
@Murray-wk3hz5 ай бұрын
My dad loved his too.
@makerspace5335 ай бұрын
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.
@ronmaximilian69535 ай бұрын
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
@grantd86295 ай бұрын
Which fab did you work in?
@makerspace5335 ай бұрын
@@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.
@makerspace5335 ай бұрын
@@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.
@JimDean0025 ай бұрын
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
@joaovitormatos81475 ай бұрын
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
@6581punk5 ай бұрын
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.
@mindaugasbarkauskas98945 ай бұрын
@@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.
@DR_1_15 ай бұрын
It's like Airbus vs Boeing, they are going to split their military and civilian activities...
@floydlooney68375 ай бұрын
TI is still around.... Commodore not so much
@weedmanwestvancouverbc92665 ай бұрын
@@6581punk if you cross Jack Trammell he remembered. And sometimes your co-workers would pull back a bloody stump without a body attached
@gifford8885 ай бұрын
Failed my ass. It was my first computer and I went on to get a BS in Computer Science. It was a landmark machine.
@CaptainDangeax5 ай бұрын
Narcissism detected
@ki5aok5 ай бұрын
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.
@steveurbach30934 ай бұрын
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/
@ki5aok4 ай бұрын
@@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.
@johnclement59034 ай бұрын
@@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.
@jonpattison8 ай бұрын
😂 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.
@IamNiggler5 ай бұрын
I love this little yellow sweet deer nigga lol 😂😂😂😂
@IamNiggler5 ай бұрын
I love this little yellow sweet deer nigga lol 😂😂😂😂
@IamNiggler5 ай бұрын
I love this little yellow sweet deer nigga lol 😂😂😂😂
@ki5aok5 ай бұрын
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.
@johnclement59034 ай бұрын
@@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.
@Elektronaut5 ай бұрын
You lured me in with the title but then threw in the whole history of TI as well. Was really interesting!
@MrNoahTall4 ай бұрын
Glad to see the clickbait title served a useful purpose
@jonfreeman96824 ай бұрын
Same. Great info though but it was the last 10 minutes that we remember.
@maxenielsen5 ай бұрын
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!
@davetir5 ай бұрын
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.
@thumbsprain425 ай бұрын
Parsec and Alpiner were amazing!
@PawlH5 ай бұрын
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.
@colossusforbin54845 ай бұрын
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.
@johnclement59034 ай бұрын
@@thumbsprain42Parsec made the best use of hardware speech synthesis on any consumer platform.
@jonfreeman96824 ай бұрын
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.
@oli24yt5 ай бұрын
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!
@ItsMrAssholeToYou5 ай бұрын
I bet she was hot back then.
@johnclement59034 ай бұрын
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"
@IanHobday5 ай бұрын
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!
@tactileslut5 ай бұрын
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.
@psxtuneservice5 ай бұрын
Still miss the extended basic
@blankseventydrei5 ай бұрын
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.
@ryanyoder75735 ай бұрын
Did you buy a Laser?
@jonah19765 ай бұрын
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.
@ralph900095 ай бұрын
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.
@jefflabute29465 ай бұрын
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
@stephenvoss60924 ай бұрын
C-64 was the unit that Quantumlink ran on which was the ancestor of AOL
@KurtisRader5 ай бұрын
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).
@dewiz95965 ай бұрын
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.
@jasonmansfieldsr86455 ай бұрын
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.
@garymartin97772 ай бұрын
The instrument that put men on the moon.
@silverthunderbird5 ай бұрын
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.
@onthefarm24 ай бұрын
I had a lot of fun with Parsec.
@rowlandspear40615 ай бұрын
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.
@herpsderps92055 ай бұрын
Hell yes we want a history of the spreadsheet!
@petervarley30785 ай бұрын
Visicalc -> Lotus 1-2-3 -> Excel. That covers most of it. But yes, an Asianometry review of spreadsheets would be fun.
@absalomdraconis5 ай бұрын
@@petervarley3078 : There's probably some other steps that we don't commonly think of as well. An interesting subject.
@99jdave994 ай бұрын
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!
@floycewhite69913 ай бұрын
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.
@kaseyboles305 ай бұрын
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.
@6581punk5 ай бұрын
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.
@dziban3035 ай бұрын
I had a ti-99, played the shit out if Parsec on that damn thing. had the cassette tape storage and everything
@oubrioko4 ай бұрын
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 🤦🏽♂
@pixelambience17674 ай бұрын
Parsec, Munchman, The Chisolm Trail, Hunt the Wumpus......good times.
@kaptainwarp5 ай бұрын
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.
@ronmaximilian69535 ай бұрын
Speak and spell had pretty much two applications. Don't get me wrong, I had one and loved it as a kid.
@JoseLopez-hp5oo5 ай бұрын
Starting the "Say it" lesson flustered the teacher as she attempted to stop it from loudly speaking and disrupting the classroom.
@patrickday42065 ай бұрын
And early AI
@wailingalen5 ай бұрын
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......
@westrim5 ай бұрын
@@ronmaximilian6953 Spell, and, uh... what was the other one?
@horisontial5 ай бұрын
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.
@schubi425 ай бұрын
they pulled the same stunt in East Germany post 1990, but hardly surprising for a company that started out in oil.
@JanBruunAndersen5 ай бұрын
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 🇩🇰.
@andersjjensen5 ай бұрын
The TI-85 is as overpriced today as the day I was required to buy it.
@Dong_Harvey5 ай бұрын
Yeah, in the US, TI graphing calculators were mandatory, despite other brands being better sometimes
@cherryjuice99465 ай бұрын
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.
@DocBain15 ай бұрын
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.
@BeantownMrs5 ай бұрын
Heck yeah I want a history of spreadsheets video!😁 My first spreadsheet was Lotus 1-2-3
@aeonikus15 ай бұрын
another vote for spreadshit history! :)
@ratvibe5 ай бұрын
Me too!
@unduloid5 ай бұрын
I loathe spreadsheets with a vengeance. But yeah, let's see that video!
@Rahmancarr5 ай бұрын
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.
@stephenvoss60924 ай бұрын
Sinclair made some good follow on computers that never showed up in the states.
@stargazer76444 ай бұрын
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.
@sideburn3 ай бұрын
It was quite the upgrade form a Sinclair! I was an Atari kid. Went through a few 800xl and 130 xe’s.
@Gobeman5 ай бұрын
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
@petergibson23185 ай бұрын
Check out that power-supply transformer though !
@Gobeman5 ай бұрын
I'll admit. It's a giant f-ing square brick whenever i look at it XD@@petergibson2318
@zotfotpiq5 ай бұрын
"You just woke up. everything is FUZZY. you hear an alarm clock ringing somewhere. you are in BED. you can't see anything."
@ToTheGAMES5 ай бұрын
Get out of bed, turn on the light
@athandle245 ай бұрын
Find Glasses
@zotfotpiq5 ай бұрын
@greywane years later my friend with glasses told me: "squint"! 🤦♂️
@ToTheGAMES5 ай бұрын
Played it a few months ago again. Glad the BBC still has it up, for free!
@jmpattillo5 ай бұрын
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.
@nunyab80034 ай бұрын
See! It failed!!
@rustywp4 ай бұрын
I got mine at a K Mart for $75- it's in my garage now.
@jmpattillo4 ай бұрын
@@rustywp we got it at Hills department store, a now long-defunct chain.
@paulseymour60124 ай бұрын
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...
@jmpattillo4 ай бұрын
@@paulseymour6012 i always wanted the interface. I only ever had a cassette deck. I can still remember the sound.
@Matt_The_Hugenot5 ай бұрын
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..
@6581punk5 ай бұрын
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.
@glennac5 ай бұрын
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!
@mkvalor5 ай бұрын
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.
@stevetodd73835 ай бұрын
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.
@GodmanchesterGoblin5 ай бұрын
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!
@stevewausa5 ай бұрын
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.
@uploadJ5 ай бұрын
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 ...
@djand774 ай бұрын
@@stevewausaI learned assembly on my 99/4a with expansion box and 32k memory card. It was very capable.
@julianopificius69104 ай бұрын
@@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.
@johnzelinka56848 ай бұрын
History of Spreadsheets? Very much Yes!!
@GeorgMierau5 ай бұрын
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.
@nickfifteen5 ай бұрын
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
@cyphi4745 ай бұрын
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.
@professorg83835 ай бұрын
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.
@GeorgMierau4 ай бұрын
@Turnipstalk No, not really.
@professorg83834 ай бұрын
@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.
@punishedgondola18145 ай бұрын
Then they made a guided anti-tank weapon, it didn't fail :D
@IamNiggler5 ай бұрын
I love this little yellow sweet deer nigga lol 😂😂😂😂
@RyJones5 ай бұрын
Did it know where it wasn’t?
@IamNiggler5 ай бұрын
@@RyJones I love this little yellow sweet deer nigga lol 😂😂😂😂
@CD3WD-Project5 ай бұрын
@@RyJonesOnly if the position where it is is the position where it wasn't.
@joedirt19655 ай бұрын
I read something today TI is still operating in Russia.
@D-law654 ай бұрын
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.
@RosellaLCraig4 ай бұрын
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
@elishadan2124 ай бұрын
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
@marier.sherman4 ай бұрын
I agree with you. Investment is the key to sustaining your financial longevity. And not just any investment but an investment with guaranteed return.
@danielt.tremaine4 ай бұрын
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
@Karen.s9894 ай бұрын
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
@awilliamwest5 ай бұрын
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.
@garymartin97772 ай бұрын
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.
@awilliamwest2 ай бұрын
@@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.
@Trump24-pw3tf5 ай бұрын
First machine I learned how to code on. 2 sprites , collisions control , and joystick control , 20 lines of code .
@curtwuollet29125 ай бұрын
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.
@dant.35055 ай бұрын
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.
@uploadJ5 ай бұрын
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.
@acrinsd5 ай бұрын
Saving your program to a casette tape was fun. It was my first computer and where i learned my first coding language, BASIC.
@dewiz95965 ай бұрын
Same thing on my first IBM PC. Installed floppies later on, learned to program C
@egmccann5 ай бұрын
*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. :)
@AZOffRoadster5 ай бұрын
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.
@ScottSimpson5 ай бұрын
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.
@pauligrossinoz4 ай бұрын
Ooof! Did you buy a Betamax instead of VHS as well? 🤣
@ScottSimpson4 ай бұрын
@@pauligrossinoz lol no! VHS all the way. I didn't start buying bb Betamax machines til recently!
@stargazer76444 ай бұрын
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.
@MB-nn3jw4 ай бұрын
My father purchased one of the second gen. scientific calculators, bought sometime around mid-1970’s. Still has it, and it still works flawlessly.
@tumslucks97815 ай бұрын
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!
@dlradlt15 ай бұрын
TI 99 was quite successful for it's time, your wonderful 20/20 historical insights don't change the actual history
@stargazer76444 ай бұрын
Let me guess, you were a marketing executive for TI in the early 80s? 😂
@TheEvertw5 ай бұрын
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.
@NoNonsense3164 ай бұрын
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.
@lufknuht59605 ай бұрын
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
@stargazer76444 ай бұрын
Firehose? They were card edge connectors, and you can't wiggle them or it'll hang on you.
@emmettturner94525 ай бұрын
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.
@tanmay______5 ай бұрын
A company with such a decorated history. So happy I'll be joining TI this year!
@GodmanchesterGoblin5 ай бұрын
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.
@dragoniv5 ай бұрын
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.
@004Black4 ай бұрын
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.
@GnuReligion5 ай бұрын
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.
@Dr.W.Krueger5 ай бұрын
not impossible for some of us.
@uploadJ4 ай бұрын
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.
@GnuReligion4 ай бұрын
@@uploadJ Ah yes, I wanted one of these. Gives you the commands: PEEK, PEEKV, POKEY.
@paulseymour60124 ай бұрын
there were other programming languages available
@uploadJ4 ай бұрын
@@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.
@middle_pickup5 ай бұрын
Germanium transistors are less reliable, but their fuzzfaces sound better than silicon ones.
@c1ph3rpunk5 ай бұрын
“Better” is more like it, it’s debatable. They’re also prone to changes in ambient temperature unlike others.
@video99couk5 ай бұрын
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.
@floridag8rfanАй бұрын
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.
@sayeager55595 ай бұрын
Spent many a weekend playing Tunnels And Trolls on a TI99.
@IamNiggler5 ай бұрын
I love this little yellow sweet deer nigga lol 😂😂😂😂
@zotfotpiq5 ай бұрын
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.
@sayeager55595 ай бұрын
@@zotfotpiq Ah yes, Tunnels of Doom thanks.
@herberttlbd5 ай бұрын
I'll vote for a VisiCalc video. MOS Technology and the 6502 would be a good one, too.
@petervarley30784 ай бұрын
Morris Chang: "Perhaps a bit sour over TI's venture into consumer electronics, he later proposed a semiconductor company that would never do such a thing." What an understatement! The founder of TSMC, valued today at $637 billion!
@anthonytidey20055 ай бұрын
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
@user-lo8gq3pr6e5 ай бұрын
Error at 7:54. Point contact transistor is a bipolar transistor too.
@lazarian44285 ай бұрын
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.
@j.f.christ84215 ай бұрын
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...
@lazarian44285 ай бұрын
@@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.
@galier25 ай бұрын
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.
@lazarian44285 ай бұрын
@@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.
@mffmYT5 ай бұрын
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.
@o2wow5 ай бұрын
Parsec "Great shot pilot!" TI Basic got me started in computers, the instructions were great.
@AmandaHuggenkiss5 ай бұрын
Hunt the Wumpus on cassette , so frustrating yet still addictive
@JohnVance5 ай бұрын
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.
@ItsMrAssholeToYou5 ай бұрын
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!
@jsrodman5 ай бұрын
@@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.
@JohnVance5 ай бұрын
@@jsrodmanOh interesting, I will!
@blitzerblazinoah68385 ай бұрын
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.
@IamNiggler5 ай бұрын
I love this little yellow sweet deer nigga lol 😂😂😂😂
@6581punk5 ай бұрын
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.
@blitzerblazinoah68385 ай бұрын
@@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.
@stephenvoss60924 ай бұрын
@@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.
@jujenho5 ай бұрын
These reviews of the electronics industry history are simply fantastic. Congratulations! Keep it up. We need to give credit where it is due.
@harryragland78405 ай бұрын
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.
@uploadJ5 ай бұрын
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 ...
@Head2ToeTheatrical5 ай бұрын
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!
@stargazer76444 ай бұрын
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.
@Head2ToeTheatrical4 ай бұрын
@@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.
@stargazer76444 ай бұрын
@@Head2ToeTheatrical It was more likely to be a K-Mart.
@nexusyang48325 ай бұрын
Yes I want a history of the spreadsheet so you can talk about the spreadsheet Olympics. 😊😊😊😊
@glennac5 ай бұрын
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❣️
@noanyobiseniss74625 ай бұрын
This was my fist computer, spent 6 months programming sprites.
@djp_video5 ай бұрын
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.
@stargazer76444 ай бұрын
Sure. Cool story bruh.
@djp_video4 ай бұрын
@@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."
@stargazer76444 ай бұрын
@@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?
@djp_video4 ай бұрын
@@stargazer7644 I found the article on Genealogy Bank. But you do have to sign up for a trial to get to it.
@absalomdraconis5 ай бұрын
Yep, we want the history of the spreadsheet.
@lagautmd5 ай бұрын
My grandfather had a TI-2500 that I was fascinated by. I played with it. 4 years later my father is buying me my first TI SR-56 programmable scientific for me to use in engineering school. Just like Mac vs PC, there was the HP vs TI war based on RPN and infix notation.
@heiner715 ай бұрын
The TI2500 was my dad's first calculator in the 70's. I also remember playing with it back then. Later in engineering school it was the battle between HP and Sharp for me. The Sharps where more user friendly. In the earlier days, it was HP vs. TI vs. Casio FX-500P. I still have one of those.
@chrisd38175 ай бұрын
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.
@google_was_my_idea_first5 ай бұрын
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.
@ztoob8898Ай бұрын
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.
@josegregoriogonzalez8745 ай бұрын
I had that machine! I do remember it was truly 16 bits but with scratch memory for registers. Really difficult to program in assembly language…good memories.
@mandolinic4 ай бұрын
As a professional programmer in the 1980s, I worked for a couple of companies that used TI 9900s for various real-time applications. I loved 9900 assembler because it was very similar in concept to PDP-11 assembler, and avoided the painful zero page restrictions of the HP-1000 and DG Nova. Using scratch memory for registers was a genius idea for its time: it allowed you to have 16 registers, and if you changed context (e.g. when interrupt handling), you didn't have to waste time saving registers on the stack (and restoring them afterwards), because each device handler had its own dedicated registers. It also didn't make the mistake of sticking device controllers on the main memory bus. But, this was not my first assembly language, and I can appreciate that there were some concepts that might baffle someone trying to teach themselves from a book.
@AerialWaviator5 ай бұрын
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.
@jacquesmertens33693 ай бұрын
The TI99 didn't fail at all. Many people used it to start their own IT business. It was a machine meant for programming, not for playing games. My uncle used a TI99 to write accounting software for shops in his neighbourhood. The shop owners couldn't afford to buy a high-end pc with expensive software, so they also bought a TI99 and used my uncle's home-brewed solution. The lack of backspace key was a pain in the behind, but other than that the TI99 was a reliable, well-built machine.
@noam653 ай бұрын
Yes, the TI-99/4A was my first home computer. I added a tape drive, a bit later. Started playing with basic by entering the instructions for games from a magazine, and storing it on audio tape drive for later recall. Learned more at college on their TRS-80 systems and its BASIC.
@steveanderson92904 ай бұрын
I was a tech at a retailer when the 99-4 came out, and we sold them right through all of the price drops. We had some "interesting" customer interactions during that time. It was a small radio shop and my bench in the screen room (faraday cage) was only about 30 feet from where the 99-4 was on display in the storefront, close enough to clearly hear the "music" it played while running it's demo program. I can still hear it in my head 50 years later. 😞
@nufosmatic4 ай бұрын
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...
@arkadybron19944 ай бұрын
I had a TI computer and followed that up with a succession of ever more sophisticated machines. It was a causal foundation step in my career as an electronics engineer and programmer.
@jimbryce69824 ай бұрын
I worked for TI in 1963 in the SC facility in Richardson (near Dallas), Texas. TI was an excellent place to work during those times as the integrated circuit was rapidly evolving and leading the exciting development of all our digital technologies. Much of the plant ran 24/7 except for one instance late in 1963 when around lunch we all went home and only a few remained to maintain the silicon ovens. Almost everyone everywhere went home early that Friday.
@puppable3 ай бұрын
"But Bell Labs failed to capitalize on their achievement. They just sat on it." -- Truly the Bell Labs story.
@floycewhite69913 ай бұрын
Most Americans of my generation and before hate AT&T and the Baby Bells with a passion because of their viciousness toward the ordinary consumer.
@jinglejazz7537Ай бұрын
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.
@haweater15555 ай бұрын
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.
@paulseymour60124 ай бұрын
the 4A keyboard was know as the "IBM Selectric" style
@stargazer76444 ай бұрын
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.
@captainobvious91885 ай бұрын
I was born 1980, my dad started a company around that time and used a TI-99 to input data from county courthouses. By the time I was a little older he was long done with it so it was the first computer that I had access to and learned to program on.
@member574 ай бұрын
I have 2 in my office still functioning. First computer I ever owned, spent hours typing basic programs on that thing. Our school had several with extended memory, voice synthesizers, and the peripheral expansion boxes with hard drives and floppies.Hardly a failure, they just left the market and moved on to other more profitable endeavors. Our city had a TI plant that made several consumer products including the TI99/4A. There was a Timex plant close by also. Both plants closed at roughly the same time in the mid 80s.
@pizzablender5 ай бұрын
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).
@williamogilvie69095 ай бұрын
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
@jimcat683 ай бұрын
My family was one of those who got the 99/4A in late 1982 when it went for $200. A pretty significant expense for my father, who pretty much got it for me to fool around with. He never regretted it.
@USWaterRockets5 ай бұрын
One of the engineers at Atari, Joe Decuir, is responsible for a massive setback in the TI 99/4 development. He relates how a TI salesman came to Atari and Joe passed him an idea how they could get easy FCC approval by using a fiber optic cable for the video going to an R/F modulator on the back of the TV set. At the time nobody knew TI was working on their own computer, so Joe was unaware he was talking to a competitor. The salesman ran back to TI and told them what he heard Atari was working on. Atari ultimately didn't think the FCC would like this, so they went with heavy shielding in their computers, while TI ran off investigating the idea. Eventually the FCC told them they were not going to approve such a thing, so they had to redesign the 99/4 to have shielding. Apparently TI used political clout to lobby to have the FCC develop the Class A,B,C mess we have today, to get their computer to pass. This ultimately hurt Atari because their computers had bulletproof cast aluminum shielding that was expensive. You also make it sound like Atari was in trouble because of the price war moves that Commodore and TI were making in the home computer market, when the story is much more complex than that. Atari was in trouble financially because the videogame market collapsed in 1983 primarily because they didn't have a lockout chip in their game consoles and 3rd party producers flooded the market with bad games. Their computer line was vastly superior to the TI 99/4A and outlived it by about 7 years.
@retrocatalog5 ай бұрын
It's not like their first-party games were any good at that point either. The failures of E. T and Pac-Man are legendary at this point with the New Mexico landfill being confirmed to have been filled with disused cartridges by Atari. Like, who even produces more copies of a game than there are consoles in circulation that can play it?!
@USWaterRockets5 ай бұрын
@@retrocatalog Pac Man (as bad as it was) was the best selling games of all time at the time. It sold 10 million copies. The idea behind making more copies than the installed console base is to plan for the game to sell the consoles to people who did not have one yet, plus having future inventory. The game made about $200 million in profit. Hardware limitations of the console limited how good it could be at the time, and it was good enough to make a lot of money. The market crash wasn't caused by Pac-Man and ET.
@ArneChristianRosenfeldt5 ай бұрын
How is radio emission even a problem when the board is like a 1000 times smaller than the wavelength? Just optimize the Lay-out so that any 7 MHz connections pull like rubber bands. Make the rails the widest traces. Connect them using ceramic capacitors. Some bridges here and there. And even then, why cast? Why not weld sheet metal into a tube. Connections come out at the sides. With a mouse next to it: connections better come out in front and back.
@USWaterRockets5 ай бұрын
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt The main issue with emissions back then was that the standards were very strict and the emissions tended to interfere with the analog TVs in use at that time. The original Atari 2600 VCS at the time also used a cast metal shield. I'm sure they wouldn't have done it if it wasn't a problem getting FCC approval.
@ArneChristianRosenfeldt5 ай бұрын
@@USWaterRockets but how far off were they? A lot of PCBs seem to care nothing about signal path. N64 is a beauty. And look how they shielded the cartridge port! That is why I think that cartridge should be cached in RAM. No custom chips in the cartridge. A shield doesn’t help if the computers sends out RF onto all cables going out of the box. At least a 4 layer pcb would connect the ground plane with all components. The metal box just floats.
@stevebjee4 ай бұрын
It was my first computer & I taught myself how to program. I became an Electrical Engineer and I've been writing code ever since for 30+ years.
@bozimmerman5 ай бұрын
Amazing video! Loved it! Fun story: When Commodore announced they were slashing software prices at a CES, competitors like TI ran over and asked them why they were committing suicide -- it was common then (and now) for hardware to be a loss-leader to software margins. Commodore laughed and replied "We make money on the hardware too!"
@Stuartrusty5 ай бұрын
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.
@goneutt5 ай бұрын
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.
@michaelmickelsen55204 ай бұрын
It's still a favorite. I was the president of a TI club for 10 years. I still have 40 TI-99/4A computers, cartridges, and hardware in stock.
@sgwyrick4 ай бұрын
The TI99-4A was my 1st which I then switched to a Texas Instruments Professional Computer and I used it to build many systems including one for IBM in Boca Raton Florida. It was to inventory & count small parts for the construction of IBM's AT & XT computers. I still have that TI Pro sitting in my warehouse!