Comment by OhMeadhbh

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.