Texas Instruments Advert - 23rd June 1983
From Personal Computer News
The new TI Professional Computer. If you want the business edge, it's the answer
Just three months before Texas Instruments announced that due to poor sales of its TI99/4A home micro it was exiting the consumer and home-computer business, comes this advert for its TI Professional.
It was an IBM clone and was based on the Intel 8088, with just 64K RAM installed, although it was expandable to 256K. Even though it could run MS-DOS, this was a customised version as it was not a fully-compatible system. TI reckoned there were still around 100 software packages that would run on it.
It could also run CP/M-86, Concurrent C/PM-86 and the University of California San Diego's p System - a popular "virtual machine" system written in Pascal.
As well as being slightly faster than the original IBM PC, it had a much better display resolution, clocking in at 720x300 pixels. The original display standard of the IBM was CGA, which supported up to 640x200 but only with extra memory. The default was 320x200 or even less.
It was also one of several micros around which provided speech synthesis and speech recognition, like the Apricot Portable and even the BBC Micro, with its Kenneth Kendal speech chip.
The fact that the Professional wasn't fully IBM compatible effective doomed it, along with many other similar better-than-but-not-quite-compatible clones of the era. TI exited the computer market entirely in 1985[1].
Date created: 02 February 2024
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