I worked in defense contracting looong ago, so this is old news: when software is purchased by DoD or Govt generally, FAR compliance notices make it a license, not a sale of IP.
What I just learned is that OE scīnan, to shine, gives OE scimrian, "to shine fitfully" [1]. Fascinating: Gothic skeima - torch, lantern.
[1] Eric Partridge: _Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. sᴄᴇɴᴇ paragraphs 8,9.
Also fascinating: "prob from Old Norse skaerr" "is English sheer, bright, hence pure, hence sole, hence also transparent, perpendicular" under paragraph 10.
and further down the rabbit-hole, OHG filu-berht, full bright. Name of St. Philibert, "whose day falls on August 22 early in the nutting season". Norman French noix de filbert.
I, too, find it confusing. The "German cognate is closer" is not helpful!
I think the ö is significant. It could correspond to English ē, but not ei, -ine.
Under sʜᴇᴇɴ, Partridge [1] states that OE scēne, scȳne are related to G schön, from PIE *skauniz "Ultimately, to E sʜᴏᴡ."
I think we have two compartments here:
1. ö/ē words - schön, E shown, shewn. Under Partridge [1] sʜᴇᴇɴ
2. ei words - G schein and E shine. OE scīnan, under Partridge [1] sᴄᴇɴᴇ
[1] My favorite reference: Eric Partridge: _Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of English_. More concise than the OED, and you can carry it.
As an English speaker, I'm delighted by the borrowing "ser schön". It is the highest grade in English catalogs of ancient coins. "Shiny" is not a good quality in ancient coins!
It is not helpful because comparing English from 1000 AD with Modern High German is the wrong premise to start off with.
The correct and more interesting comparison would be with Old High German from around the same time although it did not indicate the umlaut in the spelling at the time (which would happen 400-500 years later) – even though the i-umlaut had already developed.
So «schön» was «scōni» (or «sconi») in OHG. Also, ö and ü developed from /o/ and /u/, so juxtaposing them with English ē is likely incorrect.
It is not helpful because comparing English from 1000 AD with Modern High German is the wrong premise to start off with.
I hear this premise repeated time and time again. Search the internet. I believed this premise, and actually started studying German again while waiting for my Old English textbook to arrive. It did not help.
I don't see much difference when you consider the condition of farming and mining slaves in Roman society.
Slaves were spoils of war since before the Republic.
Even if a slave had valuable skills, and were treated better, they had no legal recourse against a Roman citizen. Their owner could sell them like chattel, break up families (slave marriage had no legal basis) and kill them outright.
The highly skilled could enter into a kind of indentured servitude. That's a separate category.
You hear romantic stories about household servants gaining high esteem and a few being granted or buying their freedom. These were the exception, against the backdrop of menial labor.
The 9900 was exactly contemporary with the LSI-11 CPU. Both TI and DEC were taking advantage of new LSI gate-counts to move discrete TTL CPUs into one chip.
The 990 series of minicomputers were competing with PDP-11s (Though DEC had highest market share, I believe 33% of the whole mini market?)
The 9900 was condensed in 1975 and went into the low-end 990/4. The higher end 990/9 and 990/10 were always going to be discrete TTL as the 9900 didn't support memory protection or mapping to the 2MByte total address space.
TI was always conscious of not challenging IBM head-to-head in minicomputers. Internal memos always projected TI's plan for its minis to occupy a space well below the latest IBM mainframes. From 1980, the planned 990/12 would arrive just as IBM delivered more compute power in their low-end... this was intentional, supposedly because IBM was the chief driver of TI's transistor business!
The design "decisions" are easy to explain. The 9985 failed. They had a development prototype with a 9900 emulating the expected CPU. The 9918 VDP was the cheapest way to add 4K later 16K of DRAM. And that was what they shipped after the 9985 was killed.
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From 1977 they expected a 9985 to succceed the cheap 40-pin 9981, both having an 8-bit external bus (1). It would have 256 bytes of RAM onboard. I speculate it would have the 9900 microcode optimizations seen in the military SBP9989.
Anecdotally, the 9985 failed seven tape-outs. It was killed. The Bedford UK team was tasked with starting over: eventually this produced the 9995.
But the Home Computer had been prototyped using a 9900 board. So that was forced into the 99/4 (not A) with some external 256 byte SRAM.
Memory was expensive. The 9918 VDP, made by a team in 1975 with junior engineer Karl Guttag, was the cheapest way to interface 4Ks DRAM which TI made and sold to itself. By the time it reached market, 16k in 8x 4116s was optimal.
Various efforts to cost-reduce and upgrade the 99/4A ran into the '82 price-war with Commodore.
Every design iteration that added more RAM (2 or 8 or 16K directly accessible from the CPU) was "paid for" by reducing the cost elsewhere (PALs for instance.) BOM was around $105. [3]
But in the price war, engineers were told to deploy the cost-savings without any new features: this was the 99/4A 2.2 or QI for quality improved. [3] The 99/4A was already a loss leader by Q4 1982 [5].
In 1981, Karl Guttag's new 9995 passed first silicon [2]. It used the new optimized 99000 CPU core which also famously passed on first tape-out. The 9995 was available in quantity in 1982 [3] when new consoles were started around it: 99/2, 99/8.
The 99/2 was supposed to be cheap enough to compete with Sinclair. [6]
The 99/8 was a technical beast for the high-end, having 64K of directly accessible RAM. Its fancy memory mapper drove 24 bit external addresses. It supported 512K off board, which the P-Box had been designed for. It had Pascal built-in. Yet there was no Advanced VDP for it: stuck with the same 9918A.
In early 1983, TI assembled a team of two dozen engineers to write software for it: Pascal applications, new LOGO, a database, new word processor, TI FORTH, and complete accounting package, and a rumored superior easy-to-use interface. Pascal was supposed to deliver many benefits. It would be a small business machine. (4)
Of course, in November 1983, all efforts ceased as Home Computer was cancelled--just as the consoles were to be unveiled at Winter CES.
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(1) An 8-bit bus was always going to be optimal--even the IBM PC 8088 saw that. 16-bit peripheral chips were never going to be made: the package size would prohibit that.
(2) Electronics Magazine and EE Times articles
(3) Internal memos of Don Bynum, program manager
(4) TI Records, DeGolyer Library, SMU : Armadillo and Pegasus
(5) "Death of a Computer", Texas Monthly, end of 1983?
(6) BYTE Magazine June 1982-ish
Based on research for my book: _Legacy: the TI Home Computer_.
Thank you for this, this is very interesting detailed context.
Do you think there is a possible world where TI would have swallowed their pride and considered not-invented-here options like a regular 8080/Z80/6502 as the CPU?
I have a few ideas but I think they were set on using their own chip.
There was a memo asking if TI should support those other CPUs in their AMPL prototyping system (990 based tools and in-circuit emulator). That investment was rejected.
Anecdotally, Don Bynum was unhappy with slow progress on defining the Home Computer, and hacked together a Z80 based machine. The engineers redoubled their efforts... supposedly...
There's politics between the Calculator division (all consumer products), Semiconductor, and Data Systems Group.
Still, TI had a TMS8080 (and later their own 486).
I'll work on this idea, thanks...
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As a child, I knocked some books off a garage shelf once and was plonked on the head with copies of The 8080 Bugbook. What the heck was a Bugbook? Or an 8080?
Some years later, a 9995 data sheet fell on my head and I thought how hard can it be to wire up a computer?
"Section 1.23 of the IBM Agreement states that IBM Licensed Products "shall mean IHS Products ..." The only logical conclusion is that the parties meant those IHS Products specifically identified in Section 1.2 of the Agreement. Section 1.2 does not limit the products to IBM designed products."
"Therefore, IBM has the right to act as a foundry and to make, use, lease, sell and otherwise transfer the microprocessors in question to Cyrix free of any claims of patent infringement."
Oh, 350 prototypes were built. Many were incomplete. The finished ones tended to go home with engineers--TI didn't exactly watch what went out the door.
I owned a 99/8 (without Pascal GROMs), so for me it was definitely real! Extended BASIC II was onboard, and showed this:
> SIZE
62235 BYTES FREE
The manuals and most schematics are long known and archived at ftp.whtech.com. I have/had paper copies of many of them. Sadly, TI never archived any Home Computer work from Lubbock, TX. Those employees had been laid off or transferred just as TI got interested in preserving archives (starting in 1983. Described in Ed Millis book: TI, the Transistor and Me.
The TI Records are at DeGolyer Library, SMU but contain very few Home Computer folders. Conspicuously missing are the papers of CB Wilson, which turned up at an estate sale and were fortunately scanned.
Wilson's office in Dallas seems to have contributed a few things to the archives. That is typical: mostly executives and Fellows were canvassed for documents. Ed Millis revived obsolete floppy formats for the cause in 1983!
But it's so riddled with typos it's extremely irritating.
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There were aproxximately 100 etched PC boards. Only 250 of these were actually assembled into working units. Out these 250, only about 150 were the final preproduction versions.
»
Really. 100 boards but 250 of them were assembled?
@Shift838 made a ready configurator for the 99/4A MESS. He calls it OoeyGooey.
You might also try running Classic 99 under WINE. That works on my x86 MacBook. Classic99 has the legal license to ship with ROMs. (Well PC99 as well but it's hard to get.)
I'm not sure if JS99er runs standalone --that's a very good emulation in the browser, which you can load up anytime.
likely not. Being able to read and understand is a matter of skill though. There are many technical terms there that may make it unreadable for non-technical audience. But you can solve that by having an AI explain it to you.
Are you going to ignore the whole operating system emulation which plays audio when you enter it? I think the article itself is fine too but if this guy wanted to reach more people this should have been plain text .
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