[HN Gopher] Texas Instruments TMX 1795: the almost first, forgot...
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Texas Instruments TMX 1795: the almost first, forgotten
microprocessor (2015)
Author : lproven
Score : 49 points
Date : 2022-09-20 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.righto.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.righto.com)
| monocasa wrote:
| (2015)
| dang wrote:
| Added. Thanks!
| SighMagi wrote:
| Is there a Forth for it? Search inconclusive..
| kens wrote:
| This blog post was turned into an IEEE Spectrum article, if you
| prefer a published version: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-
| surprising-story-of-the-first-...
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time (of the article):
|
| _The Texas Instruments TMX 1795: the first, forgotten
| microprocessor_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9520210 -
| May 2015 (30 comments)
| chasil wrote:
| Why has T.I. consistently tended to produce faulty products
| throughout the company history?
|
| This quote makes me think of many more:
|
| "Texas Instruments didn't seem to put much effort into the
| layout, which Mazor calls 'pretty sloppy techniques' and
| 'throwing some blocks together'."
|
| I recall the TI-99/4a that gave the TMS-9900 CPU a few hundred
| bytes of RAM, and prevented peek/poke or any other low-level
| manipulation of the machine (and trashed its educational value).
| I really wish TI had stayed out of this market.
|
| They sold 386 Xenix machines for a while, and their motherboards
| came in three pieces connected by ribbon cables, which did not do
| much for reliability compared to Compaq. They should have used a
| one-piece motherboard design.
|
| Later 68000 NuBUS TI-UNIX systems were developed when MIPS and
| ARM were both visible. What were they thinking?
|
| The DSPs and other core competencies must be quite good to cover
| for these kinds of mistakes. Their SPARC chips never seemed to
| get any complaints, but I would be curious to hear Scott
| McNealy's take.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| >the TI-99/4a
|
| TI-99/4a is what you get when you design in a complete vacuum,
| I mean ignoring the competition at the time.
|
| http://shawweb.myzen.co.uk/stephen/tihistory.htm
|
| GPL? GROMs? What on earth were they doing?
|
| https://www.unige.ch/medecine/nouspikel/ti99/groms.htm
|
| https://www.unige.ch/medecine/nouspikel/ti99/gpl.htm
|
| Well Apple-II had its "Sweet16".
| metadat wrote:
| In this instance, GPL == Graphic Programming Language.
|
| This one through me for a loop until I clicked through all
| your links!
| parker_mountain wrote:
| > Later 68000 NuBUS TI-UNIX systems were developed when MIPS
| and ARM were both visible. What were they thinking?
|
| Inexpensive unix workstations for running established and
| embedded applications. Also, they developed a lot of chips and
| designs for certain other large 68k+nubus players, so it
| certainly wasn't just throwing money into a one-and-done pit.
|
| BTW, whatever they were thinking was correct, because afaik
| those TI1500 machines were profitable for them.
| chasil wrote:
| They were also producing SPARC chips for Sun by this point.
|
| Why on earth choose 68k when the entire market saw SPARC
| wiping the floor with CISC?
|
| EDIT: If Wikipedia is right, Fujitsu made the original SPARC
| v7 (MB86900) chips starting in 1986; T.I. didn't start SPARC
| manufacture until 1992 with a SPARC v8 (SPARCStation 10).
| parker_mountain wrote:
| > Why on earth choose 68k
|
| Well, it was a good choice, because it made them money for
| that product line. So they must have known something (or
| gotten really lucky)
|
| Like I said, existing 68k applications and userbase were a
| huge draw. Using existing development work to establish a
| product line. Time tested embedded designs over the newer
| and less long-lived SPARC.
|
| These were never supposed to be cutting edge - that's a
| feature, not a bug, sometimes.
| chasil wrote:
| Realistically, ARM-1 tapped out on April 26th, 1995, just
| as Olivetti was buying Acorn. This was a year before MIPS
| and SPARC if I am reading the dates right.
|
| T.I. could have acquired the ARM processor. They likely
| would have killed it.
|
| At 25k transistors, a UNIX machine based on it would have
| been far more profitable than 68k.
|
| https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/acorn/microarchitectures/arm
| 1
| KerrAvon wrote:
| SPARC didn't exactly set the world on fire.
| chasil wrote:
| It actually blew the VAX away, and a lot of other major
| systems.
|
| "(1984) RISC II proved to be much more successful in
| silicon and in testing outperformed almost all
| minicomputers on almost all tasks. For instance,
| performance ranged from 85% of VAX speed to 256% on a
| variety of loads. RISC II was also benched against the
| famous Motorola 68000, then considered to be the best
| commercial chip implementation, and outperformed it by
| 140% to 420%."
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_RISC
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| _> The DSPs and other core competencies must be quite good to
| cover for these kinds of mistakes._
|
| TI is primarily a semiconductor company. The consumer
| electronics business was sold off in the 90s. From what I've
| heard, I think laptops were the main product at that point.
| causi wrote:
| T.I.'s lobbying department is about ten times as skilled as
| their engineering department. Schools don't embrace the TI-83
| calculator because it's the best, most economical tool for the
| job, they do it because they're legally obligated to. T.I. has
| built _empires_ on peddling electronics with thousand-percent
| markups.
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| Former TIer here.
|
| The calculator business is a tiny part of TI. Wikipedia says
| less than 3% of revenue; that seems high to me but I don't
| remember a specific number from my time there. I can assure
| you, though, that approximately all of TI's engineering and
| business efforts are directed towards semiconductors. You
| will note, for instance, that the words "calculator" and
| "education" do not even appear in their second quarter
| financial statement[1], while the words "analog" and
| "embedded processing" do.
|
| [1] https://investor.ti.com/news-releases/news-release-
| details/t...
| hulitu wrote:
| > Later 68000 NuBUS TI-UNIX systems were developed when MIPS
| and ARM were both visible. What were they thinking?
|
| A lot of UNIX vendors had 68k machines. I was impressed in 2004
| how smooth Domain OS/Aegis run on a 68020.
| chasil wrote:
| They did, but DEC already had MIPS/Ultrix workstations on the
| market that beat the living daylights out of any 68k machine.
|
| ARM-1 tapped out in 1985. No excuse really.
| [deleted]
| Someone wrote:
| Another example (http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-pong-
| you-could-progra...):
|
| _"Texas Instruments, typical of their modus operandi in that
| era, had the most over-engineered solution. Instead of all-in-
| one chips, TI offered separate ICs for scoring, various types
| of graphics (walls, balls, stick figures, cars, rockets, etc.),
| game logic chips and position generators. You combined them
| together to make a complete game, which was fairly flexible for
| circuit designers but caused an expensive parts count for
| manufacturing, and the chip line ended up being a flop."_
|
| That was supposed to compete with a single chip solution.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| The lack of machine language programming out of the box was
| deliberate and similar to Apple's App Store business model. If
| you wanted to be a serious developer for the platform you had
| to buy an expensive 32K upgrade and floppy drive. Then you
| could use the assembler and other languages.
|
| The RAM thing was an architectural choice - you weren't really
| meant to use the 256 bytes of SRAM for your programs, you were
| meant to share 16K of RAM with the video processor and make all
| read and write requests via the video chip. (You could access
| the 32K expansion directly)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I'd say the 99/4A was unique among the 8-bit computers. All
| the rest had basically the same architecture, but the TI had
| that strange system where most of the RAM had to be accessed
| through in's and out's.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| The App Store model only works if developers want to build
| apps for your system. In the microcomputer market, even IBM
| couldn't afford to make that assumption. Every successful
| vendor had to evangelize and grease the skids for developers
| as much as possible.
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