Texas Instruments Advert - December 1982
From Personal Computer World
TI's Home Computer. Unbeatable value. Unrivalled software.
The original TI99/4 had been released back in 1979 and was the first ever 16-bit home computer, running TI's own TMS 9900 CPU.
An updated version was released a couple of years later, but neither were particularly successful, although to its credit TI did keep trying until 1983.
At this point, a price war - that Commodore had kicked off partly in revenge for the calculator wars of the 1970s - led to the TI-99 having its price continually reduced until "they were being sold at ridiculous levels", according to Raymond Yap of Wongs, the Hong Kong-based manufacturer of the TI-99, as well as a raft of other famous micros[1].
Frequent price cuts left Texas Instruments with little or no margins on its machine - a "road to disaster" according to Yap. It got so bad that legal action was underway in the US thanks to a suit filed by a stockholder which claimed that TI was actually selling the TI-99/4A for less than it cost to make. At one point, it was selling for only $49, or about £140 in 2025.
Continued losses led to TI exiting the home computer market in November 1983.
Date created: 11 January 2024
Last updated: 11 December 2024
Sources
Text and otherwise-uncredited photos © nosher.net 2025. Dollar/GBP conversions, where used, assume $1.50 to £1. "Now" prices are calculated dynamically using average RPI per year.
