@mos_8502 :verified: We had a very similar machine back in the day. It started out with two floppy drives, but eventually my dad swapped one out for a hard drive. I don't remember the capacity. It also didn't originally have a colour monitor.
commodore was huge in 80s and early 90s. there is still active community in finland writing old school demos and stuff like that for c64 and amiga 500/1200.
game and graphics industry in finland inherits directly from 90s demoscene. e.g. max payne and alan wake series of games and also RTX technology in nvidia cards derive from that (RTX was engineered in finnish offices of nvidia).
The issue with the TI was that it was so slow due to it's architecture.
Processor was actually 16 bits but for some reason only 256 bytes of ram on the base machine - the 16K was in the video chip so the cpu couldn't access it directly & it was 8 bit.
Then the expansion memory was on a 3rd 8 bit bus, but at least the cpu could access it directly.
Oh weird - it was a different instruction set than the 6502 and 8080 based stuff everyone else was using. I imagine it probably had a very limited software library comparative to Atari, Commodore, Apple, Osborne, TRS-80, etc. as a result.
Reading through the history on Wikipedia, it looks like it suffered a similar development fate to OS/2 where it became a one size fits all and they were so concerned about cannabalizing their own product lines that it got nerf'd in committee to something highly proprietary and impractical. An earlier rejected iteration used an 8080. 🤦
@mos_8502 @peter I don’t claim to be an expert, but what I recall contemporaneously (circa 1982) was I didn’t become aware of the existence of the Texas Instruments computer until several years after Apple, TRS-80, Commodore, and Atari all had established strong footholds in home computing. By then, people were becoming aware that buying one system meant you could only use software and accessories for that system.
@mos_8502 @peter Wikipedia says “By late 1982, TI was dominating the U.S. home computer market, shipping 5,000 computers a day from their factory in Lubbock, Texas.”
That all may be true, but I didn’t know anyone with a TI nor seen one at a school or library, but I had seen systems from the other 4 (Commodore, TRS, Apple, and Atari).
@mos_8502 @peter Ha! Good catch! I hadn’t noticed that distinction. From what I recall of the video game crash articles I’ve read, many big retailers likely had contracts to return unsold machines.
@scottmiller42 @mos_8502 @peter I did some looking last night in ebay and there are a whole bunch of TI99 units on ebay for $20-30. Almost every other machine from that era has skyrocketed in price in ebay but that one.
@mos_8502 @scottmiller42 @peter Yeah, the (rather boring) software bundles for it were going for more than the system itself. That's a pretty clear sign.
for me i spent more time listing to the sound of a Macintosh floppy drive 😀 found an mp3 of one here and it brought back memories. videvo.net/royalty-free-sound-…
First family computer was a DEC Rainbow that my dad brought home from work … after it was surplused in 1990 or thereabouts. Early adopters my parents were not.
Dual CPUs didn’t mean anything to me at the time, so I couldn’t tell you anything about that feature … or pretty much anything else. I vaguely remember playing Zork on it but that’s about all
we had a Compaq Presario 5000. I'm pretty sure it was the AMD duron model with 64mb of ram. I just remember thinking that color on it was cool because the only computers I had seen before that were completely beige lol
We had one of those for our 3rd family computer. Came with Windows 95 and we eventually upgraded it to 98SE. I remember playing Final Fantasy 7 on it. Ours had either a Pentium 2 or Pentium MMX, I can't remember which.
at&t 6300. we had it for the better half of a decade. at some point we upgraded it with a bernoulli box (the original version, with the giant rectangular cartridges). it was enormously loud
@jarkko @vathpela @timojyrinki @ikkeT Yup. Clock speed isn't he full story since 8080 was much less efficient than the 6502 instruction based stuff. It was a roughly 4:1 ratio.
@jarkko @vathpela @timojyrinki @ikkeT @viznut The two things I remember are loading related. The C64 had to blank the screen to read from the tape drive where the VIC-20 didn't need to share the same cpu cycles for video and marketing pushed that the 1541 would have to be backwards compatible with the VIC-20, so they infamously did bit banging making the floppy read times atrocious where it didn't otherwise need to be.
i remember seeing some demos that take advantage of VIC-20 differences to C64. it is not only the CPU speed but also that CPU is not interrupted by the video chip so you can predict clock cycles used almost exactly. there was a great article about these differences in finnish skrolli magazine 2016.3 😀 that's where i learned these differences (just to denote where credit is due). after that i watched a bunch of vic-20 demos because i had always thought that it is just "worse version of c64".
Tandy Color Computer 2 for me. It’s weird that we had one, because we never had a lot of money growing up but yet we were one of the only kids in the neighborhood that had a computer. Lucky, too because my brother and I learned how to program on that computer and ultimately shaped our careers.
Jonathan Lamothe
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OpenComputeDesign
in reply to Scott Williams 🐧 • • •Man I loved that computer. I still have the gutted case around, because I like it so much 😛
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YouTubeJarkko Sakkinen
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in reply to Jarkko Sakkinen • • •commodore was huge in 80s and early 90s. there is still active community in finland writing old school demos and stuff like that for c64 and amiga 500/1200.
game and graphics industry in finland inherits directly from 90s demoscene. e.g. max payne and alan wake series of games and also RTX technology in nvidia cards derive from that (RTX was engineered in finnish offices of nvidia).
Scott Williams 🐧
in reply to Jarkko Sakkinen • • •Peter Mount
in reply to Scott Williams 🐧 • • •my first was the TI99/4A.
This one wasn't the original, but the one I recently got running with the PEB underneath it - something I would have loved to have back in the day.
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Scott Williams 🐧
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in reply to Scott Williams 🐧 • • •The issue with the TI was that it was so slow due to it's architecture.
Processor was actually 16 bits but for some reason only 256 bytes of ram on the base machine - the 16K was in the video chip so the cpu couldn't access it directly & it was 8 bit.
Then the expansion memory was on a 3rd 8 bit bus, but at least the cpu could access it directly.
A shame as it could have been better
Scott Williams 🐧
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in reply to Scott Miller 🇺🇦 🇺🇸 • • •@mos_8502 @peter Wikipedia says “By late 1982, TI was dominating the U.S. home computer market, shipping 5,000 computers a day from their factory in Lubbock, Texas.”
That all may be true, but I didn’t know anyone with a TI nor seen one at a school or library, but I had seen systems from the other 4 (Commodore, TRS, Apple, and Atari).
Scott Williams 🐧
in reply to Scott Miller 🇺🇦 🇺🇸 • • •The same article mentions that it sold poorly 🤷
Computers shipped != computers sold
Scott Miller 🇺🇦 🇺🇸
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Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Mirppc
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Free Stock Footage - Videvo.netjdd
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in reply to Scott Williams 🐧 • • •@sanityinc Ah, yes. I found one a couple of years ago:
pixelfed.social/i/web/post/426…
Scott Williams (@vwbusguy@pixelfed.social)
PixelfedSteve Purcell
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@vathpela @vwbusguy @ikkeT
Let's also not forget how the #zxspectrum Z80A at 3.5MHz ran circles around C64 when it came to vector graphics 😀
(now who could ever guess what was my first computer...)
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