Texas Instruments was supposed to dominate the home computer market in the 1980s. And on paper they had a good product. But things didn’t work out the way they were supposed to for the Texas Instruments home computer, the TI-99/4A. And that’s why you probably don’t hear as much about it as you’d think you would.
TI entered the personal computer market in 1979 and had some success in the early 1980s. But Apple’s former management literally doesn’t remember competing with it. Yet for a couple million people in the late 70s and early 80s, the TI provided their first experience with a home computer, and any home computer, however flawed, was something special then. So it provided some fond memories for people of a certain age.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
