TI-99/small computers (was Re: GIMP 3.0.0-RC1)

On Wed, 8 Jan 2025 00:51:19 -0500
"186282@ud0s4.net" <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:

I bought a TI99 somewhere in there. Had potential but TI kinda
screwed up in several dimensions. Users couldn't even get at the
16-bitter without ASM. The 9900 chip WAS kinda interesting with
hardware support for multi-user/multi-tasking and in-RAM register
cloning.

The TI-99 was an absolutely *mind-boggling* case of misdesign, likely
for cost-cutting reasons, but probably also a bone-headed attempt at
market segmentation and/or an artifact of TI's toxic corporate culture
(one of a *baffling* number of companies in the '70s - '80s that made a
habit of Thunderdoming their departments against each other, and then
being Very Surprised to find themselves bleeding out from a thousand
self-inflicted stab wounds.)

It's worth reading up on the details of the architecture; it's *so*
much worse than you'd guess. Best analogy I can make would be something
along the lines of "trying to drink bubble tea through a coffee-stirrer
that someone is periodically pinching shut," but even that doesn't
cover the part where the BASIC interpreter was itself written in an
interpreted language. Amazing the thing ran at all...

https://www.unige.ch/medecine/nouspikel/ti99/architec.htm

In any case, it IS amazing how much solid biz was done on slow boxes
with almost no memory. Good tight code and a few tricks ...

Yup. Knew a family back when who were carnival folk; they ran their
whole business off a Commodore 128 right up into the '00s.