The Texas Instruments ninety nine/four: World’s First sixteen-Bit Home Computer

In the late 1970s, personal computer systems started to take off, with many alternatives from an array of corporations. The Altair 8800 became an early entrant, famous among techie customers and developers. Others, including Radio Shack’s TRS-80 (noted by its critics as the Trash Eighty), the Apple I and II, and the Commodore PET, offered to a more mainstream set of clients.

Industry watchers expected TI to have a massive effect in the marketplace—if it controlled the introduction of an aggressive product. By 1977, TI engineers had been tough at work on not simply one PC design but 3: 1) a low-end online game console meant to sell for under US $two hundred, with video games saved on ROM cartridges; 2) a non-public computer aimed at hobbyists and users of Radio Shack and Apple computer systems, and 3) a high quit enterprise computer with nearly 10 megabytes of hard disk garage.

As it tends to occur in big companies, turf wars have broken out. The boundary between the online game and domestic laptop businesses, competing for sources in TI’s facility in Lubbock, Texas, started to develop fuzzy. Meanwhile, the business laptop market surely overlapped with the minicomputer and transportable terminal products from TI’s Data Systems Division. Ultimately, the online game and private computer efforts merged, and the business laptop was moved to the Data Systems Division, where it was regarded with hostility and, in the end, killed.

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The surviving domestic PC organization, whose product became now called the 99/4, started receiving masses of the company “assist,” consisting of pressure to apply TI’s troubled sixteen-bit TMS9900 microprocessor. Peter van Cuylenburg, who turned into TI’s European marketing department, developed a progressive option to address the company’s stress. He commissioned a third-birthday celebration contractor to lay out and build a personal PC, code-named “Mojo,” using the best chips made by TI. The contractor used TI’s version of the Intel 8080A to add lots of TI TTL, reminiscence, and different additives.

While Mojo solved the preference for corporate synergy between the employer’s semiconductor and customer products agencies, the TMS9900 became a TI microprocessor. So, after a sequence of discussions and compromises, the Mojo concept was discarded, and the 99/4 ended up using the TMS9900 and the TMS9918 photo chip. The 99/4 additionally ended up with an aggregate of features from the unique video game layout (with an ultra-cheap keyboard, RF clips to attach to a TV set and ROM-based packages).

When the ninety-nine/4, in the end, emerged in 1979, having by hook or by crook transcended three units of TI control, it obtained normally disparaging evaluations. Benjamin M. Rosen of Morgan Stanley, who turned into the main semiconductor analyst and quickly became the main private computer analyst, wrote a funny article about the appointment of what changed into anticipant was ted to be a first-rate contender in the non-public laptop commercial enterprise. A revised version, the TI-ninety-nine/4A, was launched in 1981 with a higher keyboard, but it wasn’t enough: In 1983, the New York Times called the ninety-nine/4 “an embarrassing failure.”

Despite being the sector’s first 16-bit domestic computer, the ninety-nine/four, like the microprocessor on which it became based totally, was a canine. Intended to fulfill two unique markets, the ninety-nine/four and ninety-nine/4A served neither well. Unsurprisingly, initial income had been weak. By 1982, Commodore had initiated a fee struggle with its VIC-20 computer, forcing TI first to offer $ hundred rebates and sooner or later cut back the price from a preliminary $1 hundred fifty to an unsustainable $49. The charge conflict became an extraordinary boon to consumers, making non-public computers inexpensive to a wider marketplace. TI saw the ninety-nine/4A income explode, eventually accomplishing 2.8 million devices.

But the ninety-nine/four and ninety-nine/4A were luxurious to build, and the employer lost cash on every home PC it bought. One cause they cost so much to make became the excessive fee of the TMS9900’s unconventional packaging. Specifically, the massive number of connecting pins for a sixteen-bit microprocessor compelled TI to expand its packaging era. By the time others entered the 16-bit microprocessor market, widespread packaging configurations had been developed to conquer this hassle.

The 9900 additionally had a few performance problems due to its specific “reminiscence to reminiscence” structure, which used off-chip memory in preference to on-chip registers, consequently slowing performance. The decreased price of the TMS9995 chip that followed the TMS9900 overcame these issues with an on-chip check-in report cache, but there has been no smooth way to substitute the TMS9995 for the TMS9900 inside the TI-99/4 architecture.

Meanwhile, a maximum of 0.33-celebration software program builders remained reluctant to spend money on packages for the 99/4A. As demand for the 99/4A soared, TI initiated a crash application to ramp up manufacturing. But it couldn’t compete with Commodore, which had a low-price layout and continued to lower the charges for its computers even similarly. As TI’s production output took off, the call for the ninety-nine/4A started to fade. In 1983, the agency took a huge write-off of $330 million and abandoned the house PC commercial enterprise the following 12 months. Ironically, by using them, the TI machine had a dedicated following amongst customers who had bought the ninety-nine/4A because they couldn’t face up to its low fee. Remnants of that cult still exist nowadays.

Interestingly, the TMS9918 portraits controller used within the 99/four series discovered huge usage inside the MSX fashionable for home computer systems, which also used a Zilog Z80 microprocessor and the CP/M working device from Digital Research. The MSX architecture became the brainchild of Kazuhiko Nishi, who based a publishing business enterprise called ASCII Corp., which later became ASCII Microsoft. The TMS9918 pics chip, designed with the aid of TI’s Karl Guttag, became crucial to the MSX fashionable and eventually became used in products from recreation producers like Coleco Seg, Sony, Yamaha, and Toshiba. Had the IBM PC by no means come along, the MSX fashionable could have been a great deal more widely adopted.