Texas Instruments Made a Computer (& It Failed)

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[jdogi]

I wouldn't say it failed! It made me the person I am today. Learned to program in Basic on that bad boy, when I was 10😂

[makerspace]

When I joined TI in 1973, calculators we were part of the semiconductor division, later it became the Consumer Products Division. The early Datamath calculator had 3 circuit boards and about 100 components, mostly to support the PMOS processor. They sold for around $165 at Nieman-Marcus. When I left TI 1978, we were building TI-1200 calculators at a rate of 75, 000 per day and they were selling at check-out stands for $10. I designed production test equipment, it was a hell of a ride.

[gifford]

Failed my ass. It was my first computer and I went on to get a BS in Computer Science. It was a landmark machine.

[joaovitormatos]

I love how Commodore nearly failed and had to leave the calculator business due to TI vertically integrating and then made a computer that made TI lose money and leave the personal computer business

[jonpattison]

😂 When the 994 crashed the error message was "shut 'er down Clem, she's a pumpin' mud!" a nod to the oil field history of TI.

[Elektronaut]

You lured me in with the title but then threw in the whole history of TI as well. Was really interesting!

[davetir]

My first computer and I never enjoyed anything as much since. I got it for Christmas in 1983, cost $50 at Kmart. People were lined up at the door for it's release. We all ran to the back of the store to get the limited supply and the people running knocked over a pallet of glasses, which shattered all over the floor in front of me. I was a scared 12 year old but I also thought it was pretty cool.
I loved it for gaming.

[maxenielsen]

When I worked at TI in the early 80s there was a group adapting Speak and Spell to a military application. We’d hear it saying things like “close the hatch” or “not ready” across the wall dividing our working area from theirs (I was also working military hardware). For their project my coworkers coined the name “Speak and Kill”.

I still have a working TI wristwatch that I have used recently. It’s losing time probably because the package housing the tuning fork timebase crystal has slowly admitted a bit of air. In the first year I owned it, though, it was accurate to within 7 seconds.

Great video! Thank you!

[oliyt]

for many years, all I knew of Texas Instruments was that they made the very expensive graphing calculator that my grandpa saved and pinched his pension pennies to buy me as an early birthday present for the start of school when i was 14 - not because a graphing calculator was what i wanted most in the world for my birthday, but because having one was required in order to take the higher-level math courses in high school that i would need in order to get into a good college for sciences, and we were far far too poor for mom to have ever bought it along with my regular basic school supplies. crazy to learn all this history behind that one extremely expensive chunk of circuits which had all the adults in my family scratching their heads. i actually do remember my high school calculus teacher, who had been there since the school opened and was about three years from retirement, going off on a tangent once about how she remembered back when calculators first came out when she was a young brand-new teacher fresh out of college, and when she was our age, they had to do everything with slide rules. like you, i had no idea what a slide rule was or how it worked; i think in my head i pictured an abacus lol. great video jon!

[ralph]

The TI 99-4/A was my first computer. Dad picked one up in their fire sale and we occasionally found carts that would run on it. Despite the fact that it wasn't compatible with CompuServe, he still managed to get it to connect and get useable data out of it. I copied so many games out of magazines to tape and floppy… I don't miss how hard computers were back then, but sometimes I do.

[IanHobday]

Had a ti99/4a when I was a kid. Learned a lot on that little thing. Saved paper route and birthday money to buy a used Apple II clone and moved on, but that little ti was my first computer, and it was great!

[KurtisRader]

I'm 63. I learned to use my grandfather's slide rule somewhere around the age of 16 (second year of high school) when I first learned about logarithms. The primary purpose of a slide rule is to use logarithms to convert multiplication into addition and division into subtraction. The design of a slide rule makes it easy to find the logarithm of two numbers, add or subtract them, and read the resulting value with a reasonable degree of precision (assuming you have good vision).

[herpsderps]

Hell yes we want a history of the spreadsheet!

[silverthunderbird]

Bought one for the family for $99 when TI liquidated their stock. Paid $70 for Parsec the week before Christmas as they were super hard to get. Got the voice synthesizer, Extended BASIC Mini Memory Module cartridges and a bunch more. Bought ALL the Adventure International text adventures. I wound up using it more than my son. Learned to program on this little gem, which led to an enjoyable career in IT.

[dziban]

I had a ti-99, played the shit out if Parsec on that damn thing. had the cassette tape storage and everything

[kaptainwarp]

On the contrary, The Speak & Spell was widely popular and was indeed the first tablet. What? It had a keyboard, a display, a true processor, ROM, an expansion port, and an OS.

[kaseyboles]

IIRC this was the computer you could use to mess with the neighbors garage doors and the dogs and other smaller mammals in the area. It could produce ultrasonic sounds and many garage door openers were simple, unencrypted, ultrasonic tones. When I was doing work towards an EE degree a few years later (early 90's) I knew classmate that had done just that a time or two in his early/mid teens.

[rowlandspear]

Really enjoyed this history lesson! I bought a TI 99/4A around '83 and loved it. Not the same machine, but I have a working model in my collection right now.

[horisontial]

I don't exactly remember TI fondly. My generation (of Danes in the 2000's in highschool) was required to acquire a Ti30 calc which now is priced reasonably around $30 but back then cost around $150 and even more for higher than mandatory levels.

[zotfotpiq]

"You just woke up. everything is FUZZY. you hear an alarm clock ringing somewhere. you are in BED. you can't see anything."