Originally Posted By: itguy08
Originally Posted By: spasm3
TI came out with a home computer in the 1981. It had a lot of memory for the time. One of the first to have plug and play. Lots of expandability at that time. TI chose to not license anyone to make anything for it. They wanted the whole ball of wax. It failed and went under. TI might be in the computer business today if they had let others produce for that system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A
Not true at all. I owned one of them from the 80's up until last year when a flood took it out.
TI may not have licensed it but there were plenty of perhiperals for it from 3rd parties. I had a CorComp 360k disk controller card, Myarc RS232/Parallel port card all sitting in the PE Box. Someone even combined the PE box functions into a sidecar unit that put the 32k memory, I/O, and something else into the sidecar.
There was also 3rd party cartridges available for it - Atari ported a few of their arcade games (I had Pole Position) and they were different others as well. Yes, some got locked out in later versions but there was a lot of 3rd party stuff...
Fun fact: Microsoft wrote Miltiplan for the TI-99/4A.
I loved mine - it was my first computer and a surprisingly capable machine!
I had one as well, it was a need machine at the time. TI did not permit 3rd party licensing until much later After it lost market share.
I could see the same happen to keurrig , if they continue this with all their machines.