Another interesting Asianometry video: TI Home Computer
Asianometry gets back to the technology-history-economics beat with this video on TI and how they finally bailed on the home computer market.
The book mentioned at the end: Engineering the World by Caleb Pirtle
https://archive.org/details/engineeringworld00pirt
I can only remember a couple of things about the TI 99/4a computer. They were closed out in the Chicago area at K-Mart with a really low price (which I don't remember) but I went over to the local K-Mart before opening and there was a mob ! As I recall when they opened the doors there was a scrum and I felt someone pushing me from the back - it was my Mom ! She was a veteran of all those bargain basement sales at department stores in the 1960s and wasn't afraid to push ! It soon developed that they didn't have enough 99/4a computers for everyone so we left.
The other memory was when I built the external keyboard for my Atari 400 computer. I used a nice mechanical keyboard which was supposedly surplus from the TI 99/4a. I wired the key matrix rather than using a circuit board - mentioned the Atari 400 before:
https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-atari-400-mini.html
it worked well (much better than the stock membrane keyboard on the Atari 400).
It's amazing how much money Americans have spent on various iterations of radios, televisions, calculators, phones, computers and all the other junk. I can only imagine what archeologists in the year 4000 will make of all that stuff in the landfills ! :)
Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm
