This is what Wayne Lafitte (the guy selling the TI CC-40 units) told me
about the product. He was a marketing manager at TI and he was
responsible for the CC-40.
"This product was manufactured out of Lubbock, Texas in 1982-1983
timeframe. There were only a few thousand 6K CC40s made and only a few
hundred 18K CC40s made. The wafertape (stringy floppy) met it's end early
on because of compatibility issues between units. These didn't make it
past the prototype stage (very few made). Most of the cartridges were
developed from the software libraries created for the TI59 and TI58 hand
held programmable calculators. The 18K CC40s were made to support the
industrial markets and VARs, but really didn't take off. If you remember,
the IBM PCs came out in 1983, the Hewlett Packard hand held programmable
calculators, and Texas Instruments fiasco with the TI99/4 home computer
pretty much killed this product. By the way, a new hand held calculator
(the TI88) was being prototyped at the same time as the CC40. The TI88 was
a very neat little replacement for the TI59 but the product was cancelled
before it was put in production because the CC40 was believed to be
better. In my opinion, that was a mistake.
"The CC40 products were mainly sold through TI employee sales stores and
never really reached the consumer market. There were a few VAR customers."
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger
http://www.vintage.org
Received on Tue Feb 20 2001 - 19:21:22 GMT