Comment by PaulHoule
21 hours ago
16-bit registers, operations, etc. yeah. A bigger machine of the TM9 series would be more like a PDP-11.
21 hours ago
16-bit registers, operations, etc. yeah. A bigger machine of the TM9 series would be more like a PDP-11.
The 9900 was exactly contemporary with the LSI-11 CPU. Both TI and DEC were taking advantage of new LSI gate-counts to move discrete TTL CPUs into one chip.
The 990 series of minicomputers were competing with PDP-11s (Though DEC had highest market share, I believe 33% of the whole mini market?)
The 9900 was condensed in 1975 and went into the low-end 990/4. The higher end 990/9 and 990/10 were always going to be discrete TTL as the 9900 didn't support memory protection or mapping to the 2MByte total address space.
TI was always conscious of not challenging IBM head-to-head in minicomputers. Internal memos always projected TI's plan for its minis to occupy a space well below the latest IBM mainframes. From 1980, the planned 990/12 would arrive just as IBM delivered more compute power in their low-end... this was intentional, supposedly because IBM was the chief driver of TI's transistor business!
In fact it was a miniaturized TI-990 minicomputer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-990