Noticed this on CPUShack. This is only 5 year after the US landed
on the moon remember.

http://www.cpushack.com/2020/08/09/t...nanoprocessor/

Andrew

Does anyone remember the home computer by Texas Instruments, the TI 99/4A,
the name probably contributed to its lack of success. It was the first 16bit
processor. It predated most of the 8 bit machines, but of course being non
standard, it lost out due to nobody supporting it in machine code terms and
so ended up as an oddity that had a stepped keyboard, a bit like a
typewriter, and a cart slot for games.
Brian

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Noticed this on CPUShack. This is only 5 year after the US landed
on the moon remember.

http://www.cpushack.com/2020/08/09/t...nanoprocessor/

Andrew

On 13/08/2020 08:35, Brian Gaff (Sofa) wrote:
Does anyone remember the home computer by Texas Instruments, the TI 99/4A,
the name probably contributed to its lack of success. It was the first 16bit
processor. It predated most of the 8 bit machines, but of course being non
standard, it lost out due to nobody supporting it in machine code terms and
so ended up as an oddity that had a stepped keyboard, a bit like a
typewriter, and a cart slot for games.
Brian

I considered buying one.

Interesting CPU - perfect for Fortran. Useless for C or Pascal.

Andy

On 2020-08-12 16:28, Andrew wrote:
Noticed this on CPUShack. This is only 5 year after the US landed
on the moon remember.

http://www.cpushack.com/2020/08/09/t...nanoprocessor/

Ken Shirriff's blog has more on this processor:

https://twitter.com/kenshirriff/stat...99181957136384
http://www.righto.com/2020/09/inside...igh-speed.html
http://www.righto.com/2020/09/hp-nan...i-reverse.html

There are other examples of reverse engineering ICs on his blog.

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Graham Nye
news(a)thenyes.org.uk

On 13/08/2020 22:04, Vir Campestris wrote:
On 13/08/2020 08:35, Brian Gaff (Sofa) wrote:
Does anyone remember the home computer by Texas Instruments, the TI
99/4A,
the name probably contributed to its lack of success. It was the first
16bit
processor. It predated most of the 8 bit machines, but of course being
non
standard, it lost out due to nobody supporting it in machine code
terms and
so ended up as an oddity that had a stepped keyboard, a bit like a
typewriter, and a cart slot for games.
Â* Brian

I considered buying one.

Interesting CPU - perfect for Fortran. Useless for C or Pascal.

Andy
Yes, but look how fast you could context switch on it!

You could emulate the missing hardware stack register using post and pre
autoincrementing addressing on one of the GP regsiters.

However what contributed to its lack of success was the lack of
software, the fact it was a 16bit machine crippled with an 8 bit memory
bus (in 99/4 not the TMS9900) which slowed it a lot and it cost an
absolute fortune.