On Oct 31, 11:53 pm, jt august <starsa...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> In article
> <bruce#fanboy.net-45D5A0.09435431102...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> Bruce Tomlin <bruce#fanboy....@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> > Except for one thing. They put in very little CPU RAM (256 bytes!),
and
> > used the VDP RAM for storing BASIC programs. This made for very slow
> > performance without having an expansion unit. (Once in a Best catalog
> > store, I found a TI 99/4A sitting at the READY prompt. I hit the ENTER
> > key. It took a whole freaking second for it to do *nothing*!) It
didn't
> > help performance any that the "registers" were kept in RAM. And while
it
> > used a 16-bit CPU, it still had a 16-bit address bus and had the same
> > memory limitations as 8-bit computers in a day when a full 64K of DRAM
> > was becoming affordable.
>
> Again, more of the litany of product errors that TI saddled itself with.
> Had they employed more of an engineering design, and the internal
> politics hadn't dictated what the 99/4(a) was, the machine itself could
> have been so terribly much more.
>
> > TI's insistence on the PEB being the only official expansion option
made
> > it unlikely that anyone would experience it in any other way than its
> > basic configuration, with tapes and cartridges. (There were
third-party
> > options, but most TI owners wouldn't have known about them.) Even if
it
> > was with IMHO a much less than perfect design, Commodore did make it
> > possible to hook up an affordable floppy disk drive without having to
> > buy a boat anchor first.
>
> Which shows why in the final analysis, the C=64 campaign was successful,
> and the TI campaign was ultimately self-destructive.
>
> jt
The disk drive being an example of marketing - it wasn't better than
the TI disk system, being slower than slow, but it was cheaper... and
nobody really knew it when it was introduced...
Guess it was "good enough".
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