So... a couple of things: 1. Rhines implies TI never made an 8-bit CPU, but tried to "leapfrog" the industry and go direct to 16-bit. This isn't exactly true.

So... a couple of things: 1. Rhines implies TI never made an 8-bit CPU, but tried to "leapfrog" the industry and go direct to 16-bit. This isn't exactly true. TI competed with Intel on the Datapoint contract, but didn't win. Intel went on to evolve the 8008 into the 8080 and turn it into a commercial product. But TI shelved it's TMX1795 project. My guess is they already had a nice chip business and didn't need to risk anything on building a "pie in the sky" project like a single-chip microprocessor. I mean, imagine, a CPU on a single chip! How unrealistic! https://www.righto.com/2015/05/the-texas-instruments-tmx-1795-first.html https://www.righto.com/2015/05/the-texas-instruments-tmx-179... 2. The 9900 series was't a loser by the standards of the day. Sure, it didn't get picked up by IBM, which made it a loser by 1981 standards. But by 1978, it was picking up some design wins because for less than $100k, you could buy a 990 mini-computer with a full-fledged development system (Assembler, Linker, Pascal Compiler, etc.) The 8080 was a lot cheaper in volume, but development was slightly more difficult. Intel's 8080 development systems weren't really that great, though by early 1980 they were light years ahead of TI (you could get an official Intel development system for around $35k IIRC.) As an interesting aside, Marinchip Systems shipped a S-100 board with a 9900 (9940? 9995?) CPU. But it didn't take off, so they started selling software and changed their name to AutoCAD. http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/Marinchip/9900%20CPU%20board/9900%20CPU.htm http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/Marinchip/990... 3. The 99105 / 99110 (with a much larger address space) was definitely on the drawing board in '78. IBM probably asked "hey. what chips do you have right now?" 4. Everyone likes to rag on the 9900 for being a memory-to-memory architecture. But in the day, the plan was to put your register file in bipolar memory. This was before we all got the RISC religion, and it wasn't so obviously bad. 5. This article only scratches the surface of the dysfunction that was the TI-99/4. But... the industry learned a lot of what NOT to do by watching TI try to deliver a game console. But to recap. Sure. The 9900 had some problems. The 9980 kept having more and more problems. But the 9995 wasn't half bad. And the 99105 & 99110 weren't bad at all.