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TI's 1983 plans


Casey

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Something I was thinking about the other day, and maybe no one knows, but thought I would bring it up.

 

TI's original expansion system consisted of the sidecars, which were all replaced with the PEB. We know that TI was developing the Hex-Bus for expansion, with a sidecar peripheral for the 99/4A and built in for later/unreleased models. So let's assume that TI didn't get out of the game then. Was there a plan to re-release a 32K sidecar peripheral in the new style as well? If everything that was announced or planned had been released, you could have a 99/4A with a speech synthesizer, a Hex Bus interface and then a Hex Bus disk or wafertape system and the RS232 peripheral and you'd have no need for the PEB... Except for the missing 32K memory expansion. I'd have to think a new sidecar would have been created to address that issue, but I'm wondering if anyone knows if that was in the works. And then you are back to the sidecar model that TI wanted to get rid of with the PEB. Thoughts?

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Well I knew about that one, but were they even still selling it after the PEB was released? And since it didn't match the style of the beige console, I'm fairly sure they'd have redesigned it in the style of the beige sidecars, if that was the intended expansion method.

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The TI-99/8 did not need any memory expansion, and if so, it would have been provided in the P-Box (which was not fully abandoned, judging from the existing I/O port). Same goes for the successors TI-99/4B and TI-99/5, according to Fabrice's website.

 

Anyway, you could not connect a memory expansion to the Hexbus, unless you intend to have something like a RAMdisk. The Hexbus is a four-bit parallel bus, so you have no direct memory access. I suppose just for that reason, TI was forced to pack all memory inside the console.

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Just trying to clarify...I believe the question was basically "Would TI have come out with a 32K expansion in the style of the beige redesigned hex-bus adapter and speech synthesizer?"

It's an interesting question. A lot of the best disk software would still have required a controller and drive, which meant a PE Box. There are rumors of a hex bus disk drive that never made it out of (or even into) prototype stage. All of the hex bus peripherals seem to have concessions of some sort. Wafertape was faster than cassette, but slower than disk and not truly random access. The Printer 80 was pretty limited, as was the Plotter. The only peripheral that didn't seem to have trade offs was the RS232 (and face it, what really IS there to trade off in such a fairly simple device?)

If the waftertape worked reliably and could have been a means of distributing software, then I suppose I could see a console with a hexbus interface, Extended BASIC, and a redesigned 32K. But then that probably means the console would have at LEAST three devices off the expansion port (speech, hexbus, and memory). Narrower than the original sidecars, for sure, but one bump and you probably disconnect something and lock up the system.

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Just trying to clarify...I believe the question was basically "Would TI have come out with a 32K expansion in the style of the beige redesigned hex-bus adapter and speech synthesizer?"

 

It's an interesting question. A lot of the best disk software would still have required a controller and drive, which meant a PE Box. There are rumors of a hex bus disk drive that never made it out of (or even into) prototype stage. All of the hex bus peripherals seem to have concessions of some sort. Wafertape was faster than cassette, but slower than disk and not truly random access. The Printer 80 was pretty limited, as was the Plotter. The only peripheral that didn't seem to have trade offs was the RS232 (and face it, what really IS there to trade off in such a fairly simple device?)

 

If the waftertape worked reliably and could have been a means of distributing software, then I suppose I could see a console with a hexbus interface, Extended BASIC, and a redesigned 32K. But then that probably means the console would have at LEAST three devices off the expansion port (speech, hexbus, and memory). Narrower than the original sidecars, for sure, but one bump and you probably disconnect something and lock up the system.

 

Oh it did make it out of the prototype stage. I had one. Ksarul has the controller now (prototype controller alone). There's also the controller with a beige disk drive too. They had their own TMS9995 in them. (Reminds me how the C64 drives had a 6502 as well!)

 

http://www.ninerpedia.org/index.php?title=TI-99/8_Peripherals

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Oh it did make it out of the prototype stage. I had one. Ksarul has the controller now (prototype controller alone). There's also the controller with a beige disk drive too. They had their own TMS9995 in them. (Reminds me how the C64 drives had a 6502 as well!)

 

http://www.ninerpedia.org/index.php?title=TI-99/8_Peripherals

 

But...surely that WAS a prototype. So ok, it made it into prototype for sure, and prototypes exist. But it was never GA, right? I don't recall seeing it in any price lists from TI or any catalogs.

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Yes, essentially this is what I meant. TI's plans were quite clearly to use the Hex-Bus as the means of expansion since the devices were to have been cheaper that a PEB with its cards, and the peripherals could work with the CC-40 and 99/2 (which did not have I/O expansion connectors), the 99/8 (which did) and the 99/4A with the Hex-Bus adapter. That led me to wondering how the 32K memory expansion would have been envisioned since to my knowledge, while we've seen pictures at least of the new beige sidecar Speech Synthesizer and the Hex-Bus interface, and we know of prototypes of the Hex-Bus Disk Controller/Drive. we've (to my knowledge) never seen a 32K expansion sidecar for the 99/4A in the beige style.

 

That led me to thinking how it became an almost everything old is new again approach to expansion from TI.

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i remember some discussion around beige peripherals and always thought that it would've been cool for a Beige Speech Synth, or Beige Memory Expansion to complement the beige 99/4A :)

 

We had both flavors at the house, I do remember there being beige joysticks and a beige tape deck.

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The Hex-Bus Series was meant as low-budget peripherals.

Further the 99/2 was planned as low-budget computer. It's I/O Bus was meant for Memory Expansion.

The CC-40 was available with 18K as well instead of only 6K.

 

This 99/8 document shows that the 99/8 was started and build with the constraint to maintain a 99/4 99/8 compatible Expansion Box.

But later the demise of the 1982-82 Expansion Box was decided.

The same document talks about a 99/8 Expansion Box.

ftp://ftp.whtech.com/datasheets%20and%20manuals/99-8%20Computer/TI-99_8%20I_O%20Port%20Specifications.pdf

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There is a bunch of interesting stuff in this document. Thanks! At least the time this doc was written, it must have been TI's intention to use Hex-Bus on everything except the 99/8, which could use either Hex-Bus or the new 99/8 PEB. With the 99/8 being positioned as the performance computer, TI would have had to know they would need some sort of 80-column card or something quickly after it was released to really make it a suitable business computer. With as much memory expansion as it supported, it could have been very powerful, but 40-columns just wouldn't have been enough.

 

While perusing through the manuals on whtech, I did see that TI was working on an IEEE-488 card. Attach a Commodore 8250 dual drive to one of those and you'd have a lot of storage capacity.

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I have an IEEE-488 card and had actually considered trying to get one of the Commodore drives to work with it. I've just never made the effort to buy one of the drives to test it with. Commodore (and many IEEE-488 vendors back then) didn't always strictly adhere to the standard, so it may not work. . .but eventually testing that is still on my list.

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