Triton Turbo XT

The Triton Turbo XT is an interesting piece of 1980s oddware. The picture kind of gives it away. But that’s not a TI-99/4A perched in front of an XT clone for no reason. The Triton Turbo XT was an upgrade to make your TI-99 IBM compatible. Sort of.

What the Triton Turbo XT was

Let’s get real here. The Triton Turbo XT was an ordinary commodity XT clone, functionally identical to any no-name clone you could have bought out of the pages of Computer Shopper in the late 1980s, or from any number of small independent computer stores that sold their own machines built from generic parts that they imported from… Somewhere.

The difference between the Triton Turbo XT and the Turbo XT from Bob’s Better Business World on Shenandoah Street is the keyboard. The Triton Turbo XT didn’t come with a keyboard. Instead, it came with a sidecar you plugged into your TI-99 and turned your TI-99 into an XT keyboard. It also contained some video pass through circuitry so you could still use your TI like a TI, and have it share a monitor with your XT.

So it wasn’t a matter of making your TI IBM compatible so much as it was a creative way to repurpose your TI as a keyboard for a new IBM compatible.

It wasn’t emulation. It was bolting two systems together.

You can think of it like the Mimic Systems Spartan accessory for the rival Commodore 64, which basically repurposed the Commodore 64 as a keyboard for an Apple II+ clone. The difference is that in 1987, a PC/XT clone was a lot more useful than an Apple II+ clone. Yes, the XT was outmoded by 1987, but people were still buying them. A 386 was 25 times faster, but it cost eight times as much. So it made sense to buy a cheap XT-class machine and wait for prices to come down.

At $499, the Triton Turbo XT wasn’t a phenomenal price, but it was a fair price.

Why the Triton Turbo XT is rare today

Nevertheless, not a lot of units sold, and there were several reasons for that. First, The 1987 release date was pretty late in the world of the TI-99. TI discontinued it in 1984. TI sold around 3 million TI-99s, but that didn’t mean there were 3 million people still using them in 1987, and the people who bought one as a closeout in 1983 or 1984, used it for a little while, and then got bored with it, while the ideal audience for this product, were also the hardest for Triton to reach.

But the other problem was the price. $499 was a fair price for what it was, but not a phenomenal price. And what you were really doing was repurposing a Texas Instruments keyboard on a PC. PC software was not written with the Texas Instruments keyboard in mind, so it wasn’t an ideal user experience. Think about when you put a PC keyboard on a Mac and can’t remember how control, alt, and the Windows key map to control, command, and option. It’s not the easiest thing to remember. Now consider having to do that and not having some of the keys at all.

What people bought instead of the Triton Turbo XT

Meanwhile, here was Radio Shack, advertising Tandy 1000 machines with an integrated keyboard, an operating system, and some useful software for around $700. Sure, that specific model was less expandable, and it was $200 more, but there was a catch with the Triton. The operating system was another $70. So the price difference between the two wasn’t $200, it was more like $130. And Radio Shack was bundling a color monitor, which was worth more than $130.

So it was really more practical to buy a more conventional PC, use that for PC things, and connect the TI to whichever TV you didn’t have a game console connected to to act as a second computer. And that’s not as bad of an idea as it sounds. The TI’s ecosystem wasn’t dead in 1987, with small, independent publishers like Databiotics and Asgard still cranking out titles.

So the Triton Turbo XT was an interesting idea, but it was more interesting than practical. And over the next couple of years the number of XT clones you could buy for similar money kept right on increasing.

Survival rate of the Triton Turbo XT units that did sell

So not a lot of Triton Turbo XTs sold, and more of the sidecars seem to have survived than the system units. That’s understandable. By 1991 or so, XT machines were increasingly outmoded, and if you were interested in anything other than running DOS software like WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, you were really in the market for a 386 or 486 that could run Windows. By then, those systems were readily available and prices were decreasing steadily.

Sometime in the ’90s, we reached a point where both the TI and the XT were obsolete, but the TI was more interesting. Someone reading this now would say hold on a minute, they are both interesting. But there was a stretch of about 20 years when there was very limited interest in XT type machines.

I wish I had done a better job of tracking it, but it really does seem like interest in both types of machines really started to accelerate sometime in the mid 2010s. And it took off like a rocket in 2020.

In the meantime, there was ample opportunity for the Triton and the TI to become separated, so that’s why the sidecar alone is more common today than the sidecar plus a system unit. There’s no guarantee anyone remembered what the sidecar did, but it at least looked like it went with the TI.

But if you are lucky enough to have found one, you found and interesting piece of computing history, a snapshot of the brief moment in time where one could make the argument that it made sense to repurpose an aged home computer as a keyboard for a somewhat newer computer. And if you have room to set one up, it makes an interesting, if bulky, display peace. And if you’re going to do that, dare I suggest that you make it even more interesting and build out that TI into a nice TI sidecar train?

I’d do that if I had one. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. But I’d still do it.