It failed the requirements and was then repurposed by TI?
It failed the requirements and was then repurposed by TI?
Source: David Pitts, who worked on the platform. https://www.cozx.com/dpitts/ti990.html
Turns out there was a variant called SBP9900 which was hardened for military use.
TI definitely had a defense oriented business up until the late 90s when they sold their Defense Semiconductor Engineering Group (DESG) to (I think) Raytheon.
https://forums.atariage.com/topic/373742-ti-960-texas-instru...
so maybe I'm mis-remembering it. But wasn't the 990 already planned as being a cost reduced version of the 960 and 980? Though in those days it seemed like a lot of computer systems were being built for specific customers. The story I heard about the 8008 and TMX1795 were they were built exclusively to win the DataPoint terminal contract.
More info on the TMX1795 from Ken Sherriff: https://www.righto.com/2015/05/the-texas-instruments-tmx-179...
Thx for the reference in your post, but it doesn't say anything about the 990 being developed for a Hotel Chain (though I have a distinct memory of it being used as a prop in the TV series "Hotel" -- https://starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=578 ) Maybe you saw the hotel reference on a different page?
I pinged Dave and asked about it and his response was:
Well, TI was investigating a newer architecture as the 960/980
was getting old. So, Daren Appelt came out with an architecture
paper describing the system that would become the 990. And it so
happened that the Ramada Inn hotel chain was requesting a quote
for a new reservation system. TI figured that we could bid the
system and use the income from the several hundred CPUs needed
could fund the new design. Thus, the 990/9 CPU was born. The
design was extended to support memory mapping up to 2MB and the
high speed TILINE bus to become the standard product 990/10. It
would have been more difficult to extend the older 960 and 980
to support that much memory. Although, the 980 was extended to
256K by a third party supplier.