TI-99/4A

~ the eulogy ~

Texas Instruments was the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world when it decided to sell a computer to families. The TI-99/4 arrived in 1979 built around the TMS9900, a 16-bit processor TI had designed for minicomputers, which made it the first 16-bit home computer by a comfortable margin. It cost too much and had a calculator keyboard. The TI-99/4A in june 1981 came with real keys and better graphics at half the price, and this time people bought it.

The video chip beside it, the TMS9918, gave the machine hardware sprites and color at a moment when almost nothing else at that price had either. TI added a speech synthesizer that talked to you out of a cartridge slot, and an expansion box to hold the rest. Late in 1982 the plant in Lubbock was shipping five thousand computers a day.

What TI never fixed was the theory of the business. It sold the hardware near cost and expected to make its money on cartridges, which only works if the cartridges are yours, so TI insisted on being the sole publisher for its own machine. Developers who would not sign that walked. The company wanted consumers who bought a computer the way they bought a washing machine, and it got a platform with almost nothing to run.

I came into this late enough that Texas Instruments was a calculator company to me and nothing else. That is what the name meant in Turkey: a plastic thing in a school bag, sold next to Casio, priced in a way that made it a decision. The fact that TI once shipped nearly three million home computers and then lost a war over them is invisible from that angle. You have to go looking for it, and when you do, the machine that turns up is stranger and better than the brand ever suggested.

~ the dossier ~

~ the price war ~

Commodore launched the VIC-20 a few months before the 99/4A and Jack Tramiel kept cutting its price, partly because Commodore owned the chip plant that made its own parts and TI's consumer division did not get to buy at cost from TI's. By 1983 the 99/4A was on shelves under a hundred dollars and every one sold made the hole deeper. Texas Instruments lost 111 million dollars after tax in the third quarter of 1983 on the back of it.

The discontinuation was announced that october. TI stock rose about a quarter on the news, because everything else the company did was healthy and the market had been waiting for someone to say the words out loud.

~ the lockout ~

At the summer 1983 Consumer Electronics Show, watching third-party cartridges make other people rich on the Atari 2600, TI announced that future 99/4A machines would only run cartridges carrying a TI-licensed lockout chip. The mechanism was a patent on a program counter implemented inside the cartridge ROM, and machines built from august 1983 onward could enforce it. Full schematics for the computer were never published while it was on sale.

It is worth sitting with the date. This is 1983, and the argument is already the one we are still having: whether the person who bought the hardware, or the company that built it, decides what may run on it. TI made that call at the exact moment its platform was dying of software starvation, which tells you the decision was never really about quality control.

~ what got buried with it ~

The 99/4A was the first of a short run of home computers orphaned by manufacturers who decided the market was not worth the losses. The Coleco Adam and the Mattel Aquarius went the same way within the year, and the 1983 shakeout took the whole idea of the family computer with it until the IBM clones came back and made it a different kind of purchase.

TI kept selling the TI Professional, an MS-DOS machine for offices, and went back to being a component company. It was the right call for the balance sheet. It also meant the first 16-bit computer anyone could buy for a bedroom came from a company that decided bedrooms were somebody else's problem.

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