Moving my Collection?

From: Eric Fischer <eric_at_fudge.uchicago.edu>
Date: Wed Jun 4 10:33:57 1997

Sam Ismail <dastar_at_crl.com> said,

> On a scarcely related note, has anyone ever seen (or does anyone have) a
> TI-99/4 (no "a")? I was reading an old issue of Creative Computing and
> they mentioned the 99/4 in an article about the 4a.

I saw (and used for a few minutes) one of these, years and years ago
(1984?) at a meeting of the TI Hoosier Users Group in Indianapolis.
The main differences from the 99/4A were:

   * chicklet keys, and no lowercase -- the punctuation marks and
      cursor motions that you get with the FCTN key on a 4A were
      produced with the Shift key instead.
   * older video chip -- the TMS9918 instead of 18A. I think the
      difference here was that it didn't have the 256x192 bitmap mode,
      only the character-cell modes.
   * monitor required. Market pressures were part of the reason the
      TI price dropped so much, but the major reason was that TI
      couldn't get FCC approval for an RF modulator in time for the
      release of the 99/4 so you had to buy it with a monitor. They
      were approved by the time of the 99/4a so you could use it with
      your TV and get by with a much cheaper system.

I think the Peripheral Expansion Box also came out at the time of
the 99/4A, ending the need to string endless piles of boxes off the
side of the keyboard if you wanted the disk drive, speech synthesizer,
or whatever.

> They also mentioned a system called the 99/8 (I think it was that)
> that was built but never released because TI decided to get out of
> the home computer market.

There was also a TI-99/2, with rubber keys and black-and-white video,
meant to compete with the Timex/Sinclair segment of the market. It
never got released because the prices of the higher-end machines
plummeted and squeezed it out of its price range.

eric
Received on Wed Jun 04 1997 - 10:33:57 BST