wasn't familiar with the TI

don't recall knowing anybody that had one either. By this picture http://oldcomputers....99peripherals.jpg found here http://oldcomputers.net/ti994a.html you'd need a lot of desk space as well ;)

The high school I attended had a bunch of Commodore PET computers and my first computer was a VIC 20 that I received for Christmas in '81 (though I did pay for half of it). The summer of '82 I got very lucky in that somebody my dad knew gave him a 24K RAM cartridge plus a multi-cart adapter to give to me. It allowed me to use it with the Super Expander (extended BASIC + 3K RAM)) to max out the system memory. If I recall correctly, the 24K cartridge went for $200 and the adapter was another $50. Without that I doubt I'd have been able to write my initial BBS software on the VIC as I wouldn't of had enough RAM.

By the time I got a 64 in '83 I was working, so it was easier to invest in - especially since I was still in high school and thus living at home. One I moved away to Houston that became a tad harder as other expenses were a tad more important.

The biggest was taking on Commodore.

Commodore designed their computers from scratch, starting from the 6502 and going up. TI borrowed a lot from their mini-computers, starting at the 990 mini and going down. This meant their home computers were always way more capable than their ever really achieved, but also cost more to make than the VIC-20 or C64. The long train of expansion boxes was one example of what was theoretically possible far beyond what the designers probably intended. In practice, though it was actually difficult to achieve, mostly due to the power supply's limited capacity but also because it was in fact the system bus on that card socket. The PEB was a much more popular and robust solution.

This design approach also led to compromises in the basic hardware. There was just 256 bytes of fast CPU-attached memory. The 16K it came with was attached to the video chip and was thus accessed indirectly and slowly. And since it was thus used for more than the video chip, the necessary tables for the video chip were mashed together in a way that limited it's potential. Yet, by comparison, the core OS ROMs provided a good, coherent library to do a wide variety of things (including floating point maths) and the expansion system was also extremely powerful and flexbile. I recall people making ethernet cards for the TI that fitted in seamlessly.

If TI had aimed at a slightly but noticeably more affluent (or even just different) market than Commodore, they would have been more successful and much longer lived.

Wade.

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