After 41 years, my first assembly program on my first computer, the Tomy Tutor(oldvcr.blogspot.com) |
After 41 years, my first assembly program on my first computer, the Tomy Tutor(oldvcr.blogspot.com) |
So the way to think about this period is like the Internet boom of the late 90's or the AI gold rush of today. Things got greenlit because no one quite knew what would be successful (frankly, most companies/people struggled to find a use for the 8 bit machines besides gaming, which is a hard sell to a lot of parents). The quirkiness of the architectures is a direct result of the industry being the Wild West. You wouldn't see it today because the industry has been established.
But 256 byte scratchpad RAM, 16K accessible only through the videochip (and not from BASIC!?!), in 1983? Too little too late, regardless of price. C64's, ZX Spectrums etc were everywhere by then. Much more capable and not that expensive.
https://twitter.com/thibaut_barrere/status/17711464663602670...
I am really grateful!
Lots of resources on the original TI dev boards and tools for TMS99Xx.
How NASA used a child math prodigy back in the 1970s: “ At that time, I led my life like a machine – I woke up, solved the daily assigned equation, ate, slept, and so forth. I really didn’t know what I was doing, and I was lonely and had no friends.”
Career scientists and engineers using a kid like this? Pretty scummy in my book.
Compare that to how Srinivasa Ramanujan was treated nearly a century earlier by the British.
Sadly, your schools’s computer time wouldnt have made anyone blink.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Homosexuality_and_...
TMS9900, which was 16-bit CPU in a big 64-pin package (like that used later by Motorola MC68000) was certainly made in an NMOS technology.
See e.g. Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS9900
There is no doubt about this because TMS9900 required -5 V (for substrate bias), +5 V and +12 V (for enhancement MOS load transistors), like all early NMOS ICs, e.g. Intel 8080. No bipolar technology would have needed such power supplies.
The later TMS9995 was also made in an NMOS technology, but in a more modern variant with depletion transistor loads, which required only a single +5 V power supply, like Zilog Z80 and other more recent NMOS CPUs.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/reverse-engineering-a...
The real winners of the home-computer revolution were the ones who knew how to cut costs effectively, companies like Commodore and Sinclair, in order to grow the market -- and the market only really grew once component prices started falling once the 80s were underway.
My family was... a little different. My father, a mechanical engineer, actually had a use for computers in the home: when the force and mechanical advantage calculations on your novel engine design became too complex for programmable calculators, a more powerful desktop computer was just the tool needed. He got me a VIC-20, and later a TI-99/4A, so I would keep my grubby mitts off his expensive Tandy business machine.
Technical brilliance didn't protect Alan Turing from a badly-written sex law pushed out in 1885, but technical brilliance wasn't the cause of his mistreatment.
Whereas it was technical brilliance that made a young, 8-year-old 210 iq child the target of exploitation by NASA in an era where child-exploitation was already frowned upon for decades.
And of course, in the height of irony one of the aims of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Law_Amendment_Act_188... was to protect the very young; so a very poor example indeed.