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

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168 points rbanffy | 1 comments | 16 Feb 25 18:56 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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SanjayMehta ◴[20 Feb 25 01:59 UTC] No.43110210[source]▶
Wasn’t this originally designed for military use?

It failed the requirements and was then repurposed by TI?

replies(1): >>43110254 #
McGlockenshire ◴[20 Feb 25 02:08 UTC] No.43110254[source]▶
The thing that became the 990 minicomputer was developed for a hotel chain. Perhaps you're thinking of another?

Source: David Pitts, who worked on the platform. https://www.cozx.com/dpitts/ti990.html

replies(2): >>43113341 #>>43120075 #
1. OhMeadhbh ◴[20 Feb 25 20:55 UTC] No.43120075[source]▶
So... my grand-mother worked for DeGolyer as a computer (back when that was a person who manually computed figures with a slide rule or mechanical calculator.) And my grand-father was one of the original investors in GSI (which later became TI.) The 990 and 960 were a bit before my time, but I remember my uncle (who at the time of his retirement was supposedly the longest serving TI employee, having worked there from 1946 to 2007) talking about having 960 systems on-board boats in the Gulf of Mexico to calculate seismic reflection data. But I found this link:

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?