Lubbock TI-99/4 Guy Question Request

[Airshack]

Greetings guys!

 

I’m in contact with a childhood buddy named Brett Clark whom was once a service tech at TI in Lubbock during the 99/4 days.

 

He worked there for a few years up to and including the demise of the entire Lubbock Consumer Products division. They relocated him to Sherman TX.

 

What I find interesting is he occasionally lets out these little nuggets of information... such as,

 

“It happened very fast. We had 3 production lines operating 3 shifts, 5 days a week. I remember the first layoff. They stopped the production line. Read a bunch of peoples names, asked them to take their personal belongings and follow them. I worked 2nd shift, they always seem to start the layoffs on 2nd shift.”

 

“Yes, I knew about the 99/8. One day my boss took me to “Module A” to show me the 99/8 line. I saw prototypes just before it was shut down.”

 

“I saw the prototype production line of the 99/8 when they shut it down.”

 

I’m thinking about interviewing him on the entire TI experience:

 

Ex: Why’d they hire a guy from Detroit to work in Lubbock? What was life like at work during that era? When did you see the writing on the wall? Did you know the programmers of the software modules? Etc...

 

Please help me come up with some good questions if you’re interested.

 

Besides Orphan Chronicles I haven’t discovered much about our beloved system’s people-behind-the-scenes history relative to information available on other systems of the era.

 

 

 

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

[digdugnate]

My dad Sam Moore worked at the Sherman location I think until the late 80s- he was an Engineering Technician that worked on missile stuff, though.

 

I'd be interested to know what brought him from Lubbock to Sherman.

[+FarmerPotato]

Greetings guys!

 

I’m in contact with a childhood buddy named Brett Clark whom was once a service tech at TI in Lubbock during the 99/4 days.

 

He worked there for a few years up to and including the demise of the entire Lubbock Consumer Products division. They relocated him to Sherman TX.

 

What I find interesting is he occasionally lets out these little nuggets of information... such as,

 

“It happened very fast. We had 3 production lines operating 3 shifts, 5 days a week. I remember the first layoff. They stopped the production line. Read a bunch of peoples names, asked them to take their personal belongings and follow them. I worked 2nd shift, they always seem to start the layoffs on 2nd shift.”

 

“Yes, I knew about the 99/8. One day my boss took me to “Module A” to show me the 99/8 line. I saw prototypes just before it was shut down.”

 

“I saw the prototype production line of the 99/8 when they shut it down.”

 

I’m thinking about interviewing him on the entire TI experience:

 

Ex: Why’d they hire a guy from Detroit to work in Lubbock? What was life like at work during that era? When did you see the writing on the wall? Did you know the programmers of the software modules? Etc...

 

Please help me come up with some good questions if you’re interested.

 

Besides Orphan Chronicles I haven’t discovered much about our beloved system’s people-behind-the-scenes history relative to information available on other systems of the era.

 

 

My dad worked at the Lubbock plant from 1978 to 1985 in Educational Products, that is, Speak'n'Spell. There was an engineering recruiting effort to bring people to Lubbock from all over to Lubbock--we moved from San Jose, California. His boss in 1981 had been relocated from TI Amsterdam via TI Philippines. Lubbock was a great place to be a kid, maybe not such a great place to be a young adult, but the city's devotion to education and the arts was citizen-led and something to be proud of.

 

My best friend's dad arrived in 1979, was a manager on a TI plastics line, and that lasted until 1987 or so, when he was transferred to Johnson City, TN. His mom worked as a 4A assembler and repair technician, then went back to teaching school when that ended.

 

You might ask, unfortunately, as an employee did you feel excitement about home computers, or was it just a job?

 

As a kid, it was weird finding copies of the 8080 Bugbook laying around in the shed, along with inscrutable 132-column printouts. After TI Lubbock closed down even more of the Consumer Products Division, we had been moved to TI in Colorado Springs. And it was even weirder finding a textbook on Cosmac and 9995 and other 16-bit processors, then a TMS9995 manual at a friend's house, next to Pringles cans full of "chips" (sadly, obsolete DTL). I figured, how hard could this digital electronics stuff be? and never looked back. I didn't know at the time that that friend's dad had been a manager on the 99/8. Other TI engineers from time to time would hear about me and randomly drop off little things, like a hard to find 10.737 MHz crystal, an eprom programmer, an old scope, a wire wrap gun, you know, things every teenager wants.