Texas Instruments Professional Computer -- SUPER RARE #DOScember

Can it pass the feared "smoke test"?

As a part of #DOScember, John takes a look at a piece of his childhood: a super rare Texas Instruments Professional Computer from 1983. This is a non-compatible MS-DOS computer that attempted to compete with the IBM PC by building a better machine, and got crushed in the marketplace by Big Blue.

This particular machine was stored in the warehouse at Computer Reset in Dallas, TX for over 30 years.

#DOScember

[mikeklaene]

Thanks for posting this! Starting in 1985, I was a programmer at a company in King of Prussia, PA that was a value added reseller (VAR) for Texas Instruments. Automobile dealers were our primary market. We sold complete accounting and parts inventory systems that ran on the TI-990 mini-computers. We also sold what General Motors called "Dealer Communication Systems" software that ran on the TI Professional Computer.
The TI-PC was a very good, solid, MS-DOS (but not PC-DOS) system. For data communications it used the Zilog Z-8530 SCC chip that could do Synchronous as well Async communications. The synchronous communications capability enabled it to work as a remote device such as an IBM 2780/3780 using IBM's Bi-Sync Communications protocols.
Later, when TI came out with their TI-1500 Unix based minis, we ported our systems on to them.
By the way, the TI-PC was just one of many systems that ran non-IBM PC versions of MS-DOS. Mazda had forced their dealers to by a Japanese PC made by a company called Sumicom.

[mor]

Brings back memories. This was my first computer and bought expansion boards, Fortran Compiler, Cobol Compiler, and dBase among other add-ons. Encounter a debt of about $ 12, 000. I did it because I knew it was an awesome machine. The hardware will run forever. The hard disk was probably the weakest link in the TI Professional. You are right, the keyboard was as close to perfection as possible. Just a great machine.

[ForgottenMachines]

John...thanks so much for preserving and featuring this Forgotten Machine in video here! So exciting to see this. We are restoring several of these, and have some advanced tools that could help you image (and emulate!) the hard drive. We also have floppy images / recreated floppies for other software you don't seem to have if you're interested. Would you care to collaborate? If so, please reply and I'll let you know how to reach me directly. Thanks!

[greggallen]

Great post! Just came across one of these in mint condition with monochrome "green" monitor, keyboard, Winchester hard drive & card, floppy drive, memory expansion and parallel port card. Boots up into DOS 2.11. Works with a Gotek Floppy emulator to copy basic games and programs to the hard drive so long as they were from Texas Instruments.

[davidjett]

This video is awesome! Glad the TI PC is in a great home now.

[don_nskt]

That looks exactly like the one I bought. And we ran a BBS on it for a number of years.

[tomchien]

This was my fam's 1st PC! My dad bought it in 1983 for ~$3 k (~$9.2k in 2023) w/ 256 KB RAM, 2 5.25 in. full height double-sided FDDs, MS-DOS v1.?? (soon upgraded to v2.11 that added support for directories and 360 (vs. 320) KB formatting of floppies - ooh! ahh!), 300 Baud (aka 0.0003 Mbit/sec) ($300, i.e., $1/bit/sec or ~$3/bps in '23!?) modem and a TI dot matrix printer. At the time, a 2 MB HDD was available for ~$2K (i.e. $1/KB or ~$3/KB in '23)!? Box of 10 320 KB DataSoft brand UNformatted floppy discs were $40. He got it for me to learn about computers (which I did, taught myself BASIC on it, took college CS classes starting summer after 8th, became a Sr. Sfw Dev), but also to help his Chinese restaurant, which it did starting with a simple daily food and bar sales ledger spreadsheet / month even with some macros to help ease data entry (which, granted, was a pretty trivial use case for ~$9.2k in today's $s) I created using SuperCalc which he bought for I wanna say ~$500. He then bought the Peachtree accounting suite of which we only used the accounts payables module and only to print paychecks which was finally a descent use case. They got me Microsoft Flight Simulator (which of course had to be custom ported for the TI PC) as well as several InfoCom text-only adventure games. I also had Turbo Pascal which I used to sig revamp the dating software our HS student council used for a fund raiser. It took in hand-entered survey answers and listed top 5 best matches and (for an "opposites attract" take) top 5 *worst* matches. My dad had looked at the TRS-80, Apple IIe (incl. Franklin compatible) and IBM PC. He thought the IBM PC pricing nickeled and dimed you and the Apple IIe not serious enough for biz. Vs. IBM PC, it had a whopping 5 vs. 4.77 MHz and 720 x 300 x 16-colors vs. 640 × 200 x 2 (of 16) colors!? Ooh! Ahh! But it was only an “MS-DOS” vs. “IBM PC” compatible, so almost everything required a port specifically for it which meant not much were. 🙄 My dad got the losing tech of every tech war: 1) Beta vs. VHS, 2) Magnavox Odyssey vs. Atari 2600 and 3) TI Professional vs. IBM PC or Apple II. He also got a cabinet sized tv projector, LaserDisc and dining table sized sat dish, but there was no “war” there, they just died on there own merits (or lack of). 🤣

[jimaanders]

I got a TIPC in the early '80' with two floppies, no hard drive.
After I got Turbo Pascal, it was a lot of fun to program it.
Turbo Pascal was always my favorite language.
In the late '70's I had built a home-brew computer with the TMS9900 and programmed a lot in assembly language but Turbo was sooo much nicer. 🙂

[baremetaltechtv]

Your video editing and quality is top notch. You deserve way more subs.

[brandoncanik]

Awesome! I have the TIPC that my grandma gave me along with MS-DOS version 1.x and a hoard of software. It was in bad shape and the keyboard was lost. A few years back I bought a working portable TIPC in great condition so I use that keyboard between the two. No other AT style keyboard is compatible with these - it has to be the original TI keyboard. I hope to one day find one and then I want to archive all of the software I have for it such as MS Flight Simulator and all sorts of other stuff. I have the original tech manual for these too that show all the board schematics. I need to scan that all in so others have access to it.

[asgerms]

Looks expensive as beeep, judging by the size and component count of those expansion cards. Wasn't aware of this computer and love everything in the 1977-1987 (ish) era, so thanx for the vid!

[MrLurchsThings]

17:08 “It’s making sounds it wasn’t before” Really that statement could go either way 😂
What a fantastic machine. Reminds me a bit of the not-quite-compatible Radio Shack 2000.

[thomaswilliams]

If you remove the hard drive but keep the cables attached. Power up the drive and give it a quick snap with your wrist. If the bearings are stuck, this might break it loose and it will start to rotate. If the platters are rotating, you can feel the gyroscope effect when you rock the drive a little bit. The problem was the lubricant they used in the platter bearings. The lubricant would dry out over time and become sticky. The drive motor didn't have enough torque to overcome the sticktion. You may be able to disassemble the drive and clean the bearings (leave then dry). Risky, but you have nothing to loose.

[aemech]

The most amazing thing in my opinion is the X-10 card. I still use X-10 to this day. Correction: The half card in the front is memory expansion. HD: Not a sticktion problem, one can hear the head being cycled back and forth.

[tarstarkusz]

Tandy built something very similar and it suffers from the same problem. The Tandy 2000 is one of these PC-A-Likes, but not fully compatible computers. Better than a 5150, but killed by the fact that almost no DOS software works with it. They work so long as they use only the documented system calls and don't try to speak directly with the hardware.

But this TI is even worse because at least you had a radio shack fairly close pretty much anywhere in the US. So you could just swing on over to RS and get software for it. With the TI, you would be stuck with whoever is a local authorized dealer. If you moved or never lived very close to a dealer in the first place or if they went out of business, you were stuck with mail order if you were lucky enough to have a mail order place you knew about and had their software library list.

Is your unit a color unit?

FYI... Byte magazine has a write up on this computer in Dec 1983 issue. It's up on archive
I never heard of this PC before reading that review.

[ghosthuntergr]

I have a fully populated TI PC working. And a friend of mine has a PPC fully working. If the drives are not working you can boot it with an hxc floppy emulator or a gotek.

[jhoughjr]

Ive seen many old computers from that day, but had never seen this. Ive been on a TI kick lately as it was my first computer, and I was angry my mom had sold my Atari 5200 to get it

[garthhowe]

Interesting PC. TI seemed to have a knack for superior engineering, but poor marketing. I don't recall these models at all.

[izools]

The hard drive sounds healthy, I didn't hear any stiction; it did it's seek test OK... Those "squeaks" audible after the clickety-clicking are the heads sweeping the entire disk surface back and forth.

I suspect once you find a good boot disk and / or repair the floppy drive (could be either - it looks like it uses a standard Shugart interface so any other IBM PC compatible 360K drive should work as a way to rule that out), you'll need to re-low level format the drive.

Once you're booting from a floppy, run "debug" from the command prompt and type

G=C800:5

This drops you into the MFM/RLL controller BIOS low level format utility.

Once that's complete you should be able to reboot, FDISK, format, and sys the drive

[theannoyedmrfloyd]

Could be the hard drive hasn't been set up yet. If it has, tapping on it with a screwdriver handle might wake it up. Otherwise, servicing the A: drive is where I would start.