Welcome to my site dedicated to the TI-99/4A & Geneve home computers

Background:

The TI-99/4A was in the mid eighties my first experience with computers. At first only for games, but soon after that it got my attention from a technical point of view. I simply wanted to know how it worked. So I started programming in BASIC. Got borred with that within a couple of months and I started programming in 9900 assembly. That's when the TI-99/4A really stole my heart... What a wonderfull machine was that. Hacking, dis-assembling, assembling, soldering the machine was the result...

Nowadays I'm working for a small IT consultancy company called IT = it, and I work there as a technical consultant (who isn't these days). Anyway, modern computers are nice to work with and the technology looks promising for the future, but (speaking for myself) I miss the soldering of an 5564 on top an existing 5564, bending a couple of pins and soldering a small wire to them to have an additional 8KB extra memory in your computer which can be accessed via memory bank switching.
Btw. This old technology is still used in modern Pentium IV XEON DPs/MPs based systems when addressed using the Intel PAE (Physical Address Extensions).

But life goes on and the TI technology more or less died a slowly. So I focused my attention on the Intel x86 and Motorola 68K architecture. I can be short. 68K is nice to program, but forget the x86. It sucks. After approximately 30 years the Intel engineers still can't design a CPU. Even the 64 bit Itanium 2 lacks the features the old TI TMS9900/95 CPU's had 25 years ago. Are they never going to learn? ;-) If you want to bet on the 64 bit Wintel market, go for the AMD Opteron, it has some nice and promising looking features. Anyway, I specialized on DOS/Windows 9x and Windows NT/2000/2003 and this market is more and more maturing especially with the release of Windows Server 2003 and it's ability to take advantage of the NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Architecture) technology that IBM and others are pushing on the high-end server market, but it misses the things I used to do 15 years ago...

So, I dediced to remove the dust from my old machines and start a project that will hopefully result in a working dual CPU based home computer using hardware that has an average age of 20 years. Starting with a simple microcontroller design this should be feasible.

I'll keep you updated...

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Can be sent to: ti99@collosumus_NOSPAM_.net, please remove the _NOSPAM_ from the e-mail address. You can't be to careful with spam these days.


Last update: 03/25/2006.