Comment by McGlockenshire 2 days ago
The thing that became the 990 minicomputer was developed for a hotel chain. Perhaps you're thinking of another?
Source: David Pitts, who worked on the platform. https://www.cozx.com/dpitts/ti990.html
Pretty sure I read something long ago (20 years back?) about the 9900 and some strange problems in a missile controller application.
Turns out there was a variant called SBP9900 which was hardened for military use.
I think that was the Recursiv, that was built by some TI escapees in Britain. But this is based on very old neurons, so I could DEFINITELY be wrong on this one. Just offering what I think I remember.
TI definitely had a defense oriented business up until the late 90s when they sold their Defense Semiconductor Engineering Group (DESG) to (I think) Raytheon.
So... my grand-mother worked for DeGolyer as a computer (back when that was a person who manually computed figures with a slide rule or mechanical calculator.) And my grand-father was one of the original investors in GSI (which later became TI.) The 990 and 960 were a bit before my time, but I remember my uncle (who at the time of his retirement was supposedly the longest serving TI employee, having worked there from 1946 to 2007) talking about having 960 systems on-board boats in the Gulf of Mexico to calculate seismic reflection data. But I found this link:
https://forums.atariage.com/topic/373742-ti-960-texas-instru...
so maybe I'm mis-remembering it. But wasn't the 990 already planned as being a cost reduced version of the 960 and 980? Though in those days it seemed like a lot of computer systems were being built for specific customers. The story I heard about the 8008 and TMX1795 were they were built exclusively to win the DataPoint terminal contract.
More info on the TMX1795 from Ken Sherriff: https://www.righto.com/2015/05/the-texas-instruments-tmx-179...
Thx for the reference in your post, but it doesn't say anything about the 990 being developed for a Hotel Chain (though I have a distinct memory of it being used as a prop in the TV series "Hotel" -- https://starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=578 ) Maybe you saw the hotel reference on a different page?