FarmerPotato

Second that. I built ought on a wire wrap perf board once I had the Geneve2020 CPU module ready to plug in. Memory, 9901, 9902 and sundry went in wire wrap first. Im tempted to go back, or a combination of PCB with next steps in WW. So much trouble soldering my latest boards. Along the way, I learned some history of wire wrap. It is a superior technology! Connections, physically, are superior. Breadboard doesn't compare. . The standard Radio Shack WW hand tool is still reliable. (1980s). Got the parts to a Jonard electric tool, but still the hand tool is second nature.

I bought from him a keyboard compatible with my TI-928 terminal. It was in amazing shape and so an amazing value.

I researched this recently. I was going to start a thread of "other Texas Instruments instruments". From memory: It connects by DB25 to a PC where you run WINSDS.EXE. That software sends your audio samples to the box which has a TMS320C6xxx in it. (Or some flavor of the 320 DSP, I forget.) Alternately, it can synthesize speech. The DSP extracts MELP code parameters, not LPC-10. For playback on one of the late speech processors. So, even if you had the software, it would be of no use for Home Computer speech which is LPC-10. I found two datasheets that describe the SDS-6000. They do have the guidelines for getting good recordings. Pretty cool that, ultimately, Texas Instruments distilled the speech analysis workstation to a little box. Compare @Stuart's big SDS workstation. I found one mention of a little box like the SDS-6000 that still did LPC-10. Maybe SDS-5000?

Many, many thanks, Colin! This is the most exciting databook I could have read. I have been reverse engineering my XDS/22, TMS34010 emulator. Like the first XDS/22 for TMS7000, it has an SE9996 just to run the XMPL software (or whatever they called it by 1988). At first it was a greatly satisfying puzzle, to trace or test out continuity for the 9996 pins. I deduced the set of pins that match the 9995. Made some guesses like 'pin 56 to PAL could be the necessary byte/word signal'. Your databook confirms those guesses, but fills in all the mysteries! FREEZE, MAP, MID, 9995se/9990-- I could never have figured those. (9995se/9990* is grounded!) The EPROM is two 64K byte images selected by a jumper. There is 16K of RAM. The PAL generates chip selects for EPROMs or RAMs. It re-maps the top address bits. The code proves that C000 must be 16K RAM, and 8000-83FE is memory mapped devices. But I didn't know how it gets to C000 in EPROM. The 9996 databook pin 58 is the inverted ST8, MAP0/MAP1. Similar to 99105 ST8 Map Select. That goes to the PAL too. I looked for code that does LST (Load Status) and found subroutines that set/clear/restore ST8. So that's the clue to unravel how the full 64K is accessed. Thanks again!

Nice. That's a TM990/101MB, the last version of the 101. It's a great board to see how Texas Instruments would take advantage of all the features of the 9900. For instance, the single-step capability and DMA memory access grant. $113 was a great price! (though you still need to have a backplane, or at least power hooked up.) I have a 101MA and 102, so I'm good for now.

Here is the correct link, where the Specification was posted.

I'll bring two 4A with P-Box and speech. One is Geneve 9640. Also a console with F18A and TIPI/32K. Anyone is welcome to demo on those. Particularly, F18A VGA out for projector. Other exhibits: Collection of Texas Instruments talking toys. Artifacts from Texas Instruments over the decades.

For BASIC, I think you would want to use familiar units like seconds. I first learned what a millisecond was from Beginner's BASIC. "Oh yeah, 0.25 seconds, 250 ms." Thinking in "ticks"of 1/50th would be more nerdy. TIBASIC insulated you from machine implementation, unlike others with PEEKs and POKEs and OMG AppleSoft shape tables. (Packed byte of 3 "turtle" commands.) Shame there was no calibration for NTSC/PAL. At least the frequencies are both 3.579 MHz right?

Edit: I put the link for the C.B. Wilson papers thread into my above post. That's where to find the full 255 page Basic specification.

Wow. Interesting bug testing, @OLD CS1 Here is "File Control Statements" from Specification for Texas Instruments Standard Basic, pp. 55-59. That is the "Green Book" from the C.B. Wilson documents (see documentation thread.) It's a really interesting book. You can find the definitions for PERMANENT / TEMPORARY and KEYED. And the SCRATCH command. It also shows CLOSE #1:DELETE. From Chapter 1, I infer that our BASICs were of the EN subsets. EN = Education Nucleus with supersets E1, R2 IN = Industrial Nucleus. No string variables! BN = Business Nucleus. Keyed-Indexed files are required in BN2. TI-BASIC File Specification.pdf Originally posted in this thread:

I have wondered if anyone still makes extra wide space bars.

I didn't notice on my own, but Erg titles it "EIA Colors" so there you go.

In the old days, a wave soldering manual called for chips to face their prow into the wave, rather than get hit broadside. Arrr.

Another interesting offshoot was Lilith (1976). Niklaus Wirth was at Xeroc PARC in 1976 and used the Alto. On returning to ETH Zurich, he had a small team create a "desktop workstation" by 1980. It's really interesting reading, how Wirth re-created the Alto concepts in the Lilith workstation, starting with a very large bitmap display. This article claimed about 310 in use.

I last got wires from Pololu They only have 7.5 cm female to female But other kinds are in sizes down to 5 cm