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As a celebrity pitchman, TI chose actor and comedian Bill Cosby. This price put it in the range of other consumer home computers, such as the Commodore VIC-20, TRS-80 Color Computer, and Atari 800, which were some of its main American competitors at the time. in June of 1981 for $525 (equivalent to about $1,409 in 2021), which was about half the cost of an Apple II at the time. Without the expensive monitor, TI could cut the cost of its revised machine dramatically. (Eventually, these relaxed rules would be adopted fully in 1983.) Texas Instruments
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After the launch of the TI-99/4 in 1979, TI acquired a conditional waiver from the FCC that allowed it to sell home computers that could attach to a standard home TV set. Unlike the 99/4, the TI-99/4A didn’t need to ship with a dedicated color monitor.
“The internal design of the system was excellent and one of the best home computers I had worked on to date,” says Scott Adams, who developed several games for the platform with Adventure International. It went back to the drawing board and came up with the TI-99/4A (note the “A” in the name), which included the same 16 KB of RAM and 3 MHz TMS9900 CPU as its predecessor, but which also included a full-stroke keyboard, lowercase support, and graphics chip improvements.Īlthough the TI-99/4A and its predecessor garnered some criticism for not living up to the potential of its 16-bit CPU, others found its design elegant. Enter the TI-99/4AĪfter the 99/4 flopped in 1980, TI decided to try again. Varying reports say that it sold somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 units in total.
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This locked out third-party developers that could have enriched the platform with software variety.ĭue to its limited chiclet-style keyboard, limited application support, and high price due to the pack-in color monitor, the TI-99/4 received poor reviews and flopped in the marketplace. Texas Instrumentsįrom the beginning, TI wanted to maintain tight control over who developed software for its 99/4 platform, so the company didn’t publish technical specifications or initially release an editor/assembler package that would allow for advanced programming on the system. The predecessor of the 4A, the TI-99/4, launched in 1979.
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Notably, the TI-99/4 included the 16-bit TMS9900 CPU, which was based on the TI-990 minicomputer, making it the first mass-market PC with a 16-bit CPU in the U.S. The 99/4 retailed for $1,150 (about $4,083 today), and due to strict FCC emissions regulations, shipped with its own 13″ custom color TV set as a monitor. What Came Before: 1979’s TI-99/4Īfter dazzling the world with pocket calculators and digital watches in the early-mid 1970s, Dallas-based electronics powerhouse Texas Instruments set its sights on the emerging video game and personal computer markets in the late 1970s.Īt first, the firm intended to create both a video game console and a low-cost personal computer, but while in development, those products merged together into the TI-99/4 (no “A” yet), which was released in late 1979. Forty years later, here’s what made it special. In June 1981, Texas Instruments released the TI-99/4A, a 16-bit home computer and gaming platform that became a huge cultural success in America after selling 2.8 million units, although it resulted in a business loss for TI.
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