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| Lee Kitchens, mayor of Ransom Canyon, still owns a TI 99/4A home computer, which was produced in the early 1980s. The machine has attracted a following of computer buffs in an organization called the SouthWest Ninety-Niners User Group. |
In the computer age, nostalgia comes quickly.
It was a bare 15 years ago that Texas Instruments
was pushing the technology envelope with its 99/4A home computer. The machine
was burning up the computer world with three megahertz of speed and zero
gigabytes of memory in its hard drive - the TI 99/4A had no hard drive.
And if Texas Instruments officials at Lubbock had
known Tom Wills of Tucson, Ariz., they might not have ended production
of the 99/4A in October of 1983.
"They were very slow," Wills said of the 99/4As.
"But at that time they were three times faster than an Apple computer.
The Apple computers ran at one megahertz."
Wills is president of an organization called the
SouthWest Ninety-Niners User Group. The focal point of their existence
as a club is the TI 99/4A.
At 8 a.m. Saturday, the SouthWest Ninety-Niners
will gather at Texas Instruments' Lubbock site to remember the glory days
of the recent past and to tour a plant that no longer builds home computers.
Texas Instruments does, however, keep one of the
computers enshrined in a glass case at its plant.
"Lubbock to us is like Mecca is to the Muslims,"
Wills said. "Because the TI 99/4A was built there, Lubbock has a special
meaning to us."
He said nostalgic users of the 99/4A will travel
to Lubbock from as far away as Germany and England.
"We think of this as a classic computer, kind of
like a classic car," Wills explained.
"If you really want to get something done, you use
the newer equipment, such as a PC that has Windows 95 and all of that on
it. It runs at like 200 megahertz.
"But if we are going to have fun, we go back to
our TI's and use those."
The 99/4A came standard with 16 kilobytes of memory,
Wills said which is a diminutive capability compared to even the introductory
16 megabytes of memory that comes on basic laptops of today.
"But we could expand them up to 48k," Wills contends.
The original 16K, meaning about 16,000 bytes - or
letters - was roughly equivalent to five sheets of typed material.
Memory in today's computers typically is rated in
megabytes, with each single number representing 1,000 kilobytes.
And modern hard-drives move into a classification
called gigabytes, each of which represents 1,000 times a megabyte, for
a total of more than one billion bytes, or letters.
The TI 99/4A had none of that. It captured the imagination
of computer enthusiasts with just a keyboard locked into a single console.
Wills, whose group meets each year to share experiences
and information about the 99/4A, says the machine is still being used in
some businesses and by a lot of home computer buffs. He explains the phenomenon
this way:
"Part of it I would have to attribute to the way
Texas Instruments made it. They made it so this machine had so much capability
that even after they stopped producing it, we were still finding out how
much more it could do.
"Every time we thought we had found everything that
could be done, someone would find something else, and we were able to expand
upon that. So, it just kept expanding what we could do with it."
According to Wills, the mathematical capabilities
of the computer were characterized by phenomenal accuracy.
"We have a company here in town (Tucson) that used
to be called Hughes Missile Systems. It was just bought out, but they still
use the TI 99/4A to do some of their programming for their missiles because
the math capability on it is so accurate."
The users group will be hosted by TI's Lubbock plant
from 8 a.m. until noon Saturday, and then will move on to the Sheraton
Four Points Hotel at 1:30 p.m. for a free-wheeling swap meet that will
continue until no one is without replacement parts or new software.
Gabriel Flores, human resources representative for
TI at Lubbock, is among those scheduled to welcome the computer operators.
"We are happy that the TI 99/4A users group is kicking
off its annual meeting at TI," he said.
"Even though the kickoff is not open to the public,
most of the event is being held at the Sheraton, and that is open to the
public."
Lee Kitchens, Ransom Canyon mayor, also remembers
the 99/4A, and still has one in near mint condition on a table in his home.
He was the manager of engineering for the consumer
operation of TI when the company was building the computer from 1979 through
most of 1983.
Knowing the inner workings, he had utmost confidence
in the machine. "Oh, yeah. I mean it was the greatest thing since sliced
bread.
"The problem was that most of them [computers] required
some esoteric programming language that nobody understood. But with this
thing, you could plug in one of the plug-ins and run a program.
"You could expand the memory, you could put a printer
port on it to drive a printer, you could put a serial port on there to
put a joy stick on. It had several accessories that were developed over
time."
Kitchens remembers the machine sold in its original
form of the 99/4 for $1,150 each. At the end, in its 99/4A version, the
machine was being sold for $49.95. Today, Wills says, the TI 99/4A can
be picked up on the used market for $10.
Kitchens thinks it has lasted so long because of
the manufacturer's near perfection mentality.
"TI was a stickler for quality. Quality was just
an environment. Out heritage was military electronics, so we designed for
rugged environments."
Kitchens said the monitors supplied with the 99/4A
were built by a television company, and some of the first ones didn't survive
shipment.
"Our requirement was that you had to be able to
drop that thing, in the box, three feet and open it and it would still
work."
Once that packaging flaw was corrected, the 99/4A could be expected
to arrive in operating condition.
Hundreds of thousands of the computers were made
for the U.S. market.
Kitchens is proud of the work put into the computer,
which can still run respectably in a race dominated by the high-media versions
of today.
"I think we did one heck of a job."
He is going to save his own 99/4A until March of
this year.
"The reason I still have one is that I have a granddaughter
who will be three in March. I am going to set her up with it, so she can
get comfortable with the keyboard."
Then there will be a new generation of TI 99/4A
users.
