Comment by SanjayMehta

3 days ago

Wasn’t this originally designed for military use?

It failed the requirements and was then repurposed by TI?

5 comments

SanjayMehta

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McGlockenshire  3 days ago

The thing that became the 990 minicomputer was developed for a hotel chain. Perhaps you're thinking of another?

Source: David Pitts, who worked on the platform. https://www.cozx.com/dpitts/ti990.html

  • OhMeadhbh  2 days ago

    So... my grand-mother worked for DeGolyer as a computer (back when that was a person who manually computed figures with a slide rule or mechanical calculator.) And my grand-father was one of the original investors in GSI (which later became TI.) The 990 and 960 were a bit before my time, but I remember my uncle (who at the time of his retirement was supposedly the longest serving TI employee, having worked there from 1946 to 2007) talking about having 960 systems on-board boats in the Gulf of Mexico to calculate seismic reflection data. But I found this link:

    https://forums.atariage.com/topic/373742-ti-960-texas-instru...

    so maybe I'm mis-remembering it. But wasn't the 990 already planned as being a cost reduced version of the 960 and 980? Though in those days it seemed like a lot of computer systems were being built for specific customers. The story I heard about the 8008 and TMX1795 were they were built exclusively to win the DataPoint terminal contract.

    More info on the TMX1795 from Ken Sherriff: https://www.righto.com/2015/05/the-texas-instruments-tmx-179...

    Thx for the reference in your post, but it doesn't say anything about the 990 being developed for a Hotel Chain (though I have a distinct memory of it being used as a prop in the TV series "Hotel" -- https://starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=578 ) Maybe you saw the hotel reference on a different page?

    • OhMeadhbh  5 hours ago

      Aha. I think I mis-understood @McGlockenshire to say the reference to the 990 being developed for a hotel chain was at the link he provided. I think the link he provided was more generic, pointing to someone (Dave Pitts) who worked on the 990 and in another place mentioned the 990 was developed for a hotel chain.

      I pinged Dave and asked about it and his response was:

         Well, TI was investigating a newer architecture as the 960/980
   was getting old. So, Daren Appelt came out with an architecture
   paper describing the system that would become the 990. And it so
   happened that the Ramada Inn hotel chain was requesting a quote
   for a new reservation system. TI figured that we could bid the
   system and use the income from the several hundred CPUs needed
   could fund the new design. Thus, the 990/9 CPU was born. The
   design was extended to support memory mapping up to 2MB and the
   high speed TILINE bus to become the standard product 990/10. It
   would have been more difficult to extend the older 960 and 980
   to support that much memory. Although, the 980 was extended to
   256K by a third party supplier.

  • SanjayMehta  2 days ago

    Pretty sure I read something long ago (20 years back?) about the 9900 and some strange problems in a missile controller application.

    Turns out there was a variant called SBP9900 which was hardened for military use.

    • OhMeadhbh  2 days ago

      I think that was the Recursiv, that was built by some TI escapees in Britain. But this is based on very old neurons, so I could DEFINITELY be wrong on this one. Just offering what I think I remember.

      TI definitely had a defense oriented business up until the late 90s when they sold their Defense Semiconductor Engineering Group (DESG) to (I think) Raytheon.