The 8-Bit Era's Weird Uncle: The TI-99/4A

I used TI99/4As at school in the Isle of Man at age 16 or so. I thought they were sad, rather crippled things then. Horribly slow, limited BASIC, and the school didn't have Extended BASIC cartridges.

I still wonder... Could TI have made a non-crippled TI99 at the time that wouldn't have been vastly more expensive?

I know there was the planned, prototyped, and cancelled TI99/8:

http://www.99er.net/998art.html

http://www.99er.net/998.html

64kB RAM, Extended BASIC as standard, expandable to 15MB.

But that would have cost a fortune at the time.

I'm just wondering if a TI99/4 with 32kB of RAM attached directly to the CPU and maybe a better BASIC would have been achievable for not much more?

The 99/8 never shipped but the Geneve 9640 shows what the architecture could do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneve_9640

Somewhere I read a story about a group of TI sales engineers in Britain who put together a much more "typical" micro-computer system using the 9940 or 9980 CPU. They, of course, lost out the the 99/4 design because of politics. Though to be fair, I've heard there was A LOT of confusion over the 99/4's requirements. It supposedly started as a video game console after the Atari VCS was released to great acclaim in '77. But by the time they released it they decided they wanted to compete with the personal computing trinity: Apple ][, TRS-80 and Commodore PET.

I think it was certainly possible for SOMEONE to have come up with a better design targeting the nascent PC market. Also remember the 99/4 was pretty cheap compared to "real" computers. A typical CP/M or Apple ][ machine would have cost somewhere around $2500-$3500 in 1979. The 99/4 was a "bargain" at $1150. You have to think a 9900-based system that had a front-panel, floppy disk, RS-232 interface like contemporary CP/M machines wouldn't have cost too much more than a CP/M device. It may be a scratch more expensive cause you would likely want a bit more memory than the 16k that was common in the Altair or IMSAI machines at the time.

Every now and again 99/8 prototype systems will surface on eBay and sell for THOUSANDS of dollars. I just saw a CC-40 Plus system go for about $3500. Alas, I can't really justify that many dollars for these old systems. When TI got out of the business, they had the 99/8 and CC-70 in development. Assuming they were able to sell them for a decent price, they couldn't have been as bad at the 99/4 and CC-40.