ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN LIMA NEWSLETTER APRIL 1994 THINGS THAT HAVE COME AND GONE AND SOME THAT NEVER WERE Part 2 Trivia collected by Bill Gaskill April 1994 More trivia about the people, peripherals, programs, publications, and products for the 99/4A that have come and gone in the last decade. -99/4A NATIONAL ASSISTANCE GROUP: They claimed to be there to help us and provide us with new and innovative products, but they turned out to be a commercial venture that offered virtually nothing new and little that was innovative or even original. Remember when they promised us the "Super Computer--99/8 Upgrade", which was supposed to be available in August 1985? What a joke! No loss when this Ft. Lauderdale, Florida based company turned their toes up. -99ER MAGAZINE/HOME COMPUTER MAGAZINE/HOME COMPUTER JOURNAL: What can you say about these Emerald Valley Publishing Company offerings that hasn't already been said? Well, how about an excerpt from Mike Wright's TI-Cyc on 99er Magazine for starters? "99er Magazine was the best of times, 99er Magazine was the worst of times. In the innocent days of 1983 we eagerly anticipated each new issue. We would spend long hours keying in Basic listings. We would spend even more hours trying to find the typo that kept the program from working." "In retrospect, 99er was a beacon of blatant publishing amateurism. The rot started at the top with Gary M. Kaplan, a pontificating publisher who habitually resorted to the poor writing practice of using italics for emphasis. His other crimes included being a puerile pundit and, in the end, a cowardly crook who absconded with subscribers' money. "The editorial integrity of 99er left much open to question. Could our informed source have been so blind that it could not see what was happening at TI? Or was it neglecting its duty to its readers? Perhaps the ad in Enthusiast 99 showing 99er in the back pocket of TI put the correct spin on the situation?" Way back in January 1982, when Don Bynum introduced the Peripheral Expansion Box for Texas Instruments at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the infamous friend of 99ers everywhere, Mr. Gary Kaplan, predicted that the new device would be called a TI-Box (pronounced tie-box). Instead, as we know, it's generally referred to as the P-Box or PEB. I have yet to run into anyone who calls it a TI-Box! So much for predictions by people who pretended to know what was going on in the TI Commmunity! Despite the negativeness I feel for Emerald Valley publishing, (I lost about $63 to them because I took a multi-year subscription in an effort to show support) I really did look forward to seeing their magazine in my mail box each month. Too bad...I would still be a subscriber had they not nuked me and so many others. -ACCESS ENGINEERING INC.: According to R/D Computing, this corporation was founded in the Spring of 1986 and was made up of Jim Horn, Chris Bobbitt and Richard Roseen. Their purpose was to manufacture products for the Myarc Geneve, including: AC Basic, AC Pascal, ADOS, AMOS (AEI Multi-Tasking Operating System), and I don't know what else. Too bad the Geneve never had an operating system dependable enough to produce anything for. -ARRO-SOFT SYSTEMS: the Edmond, Oklahoma firm that supported the TI community for several years with products like Biorhythm, Las Vegas Bandit, SpaceMatch, Create-A-File and Amortize, appears to have gone the way of DATAX and has joined the hordes of computer users and third party manufacturers who now compete in the PC Clone market. I found their ad in the May 1990 issue of PC Resource. They were offering a Lottomaster program along with another application called Biowriter. -While it's not much consolation to the TI-99ers of the world, the evidence seems pretty clear to me that virtually all "home computers" are being snubbed by the hardware and software manufacturers these days. It doesn't seem to matter whether you own the Commodore 64, 64C, 128, 128D, the Atari 400, 800, 1200 or 1400 XL, or even the Apple IIE or IIc. There just isn't the emphasis on this market that there once was. Obviously users aren't buying product at the low end of the market, or at least they are not buying with enough frequency to justify the cost of developing new products. We should REALLY feel fortunate in the TI-99/4A community to (still) have so many loyal companies willing to take a chance on us. The "Home Computer Market" of the '90's appears to be in PC Clones and to a somewhat lesser degree the Macintosh. Even the powerful Atari ST and Commodore Amiga line of computers can't compete with the myriad of programs and hardware add-ons now available for anything that runs under an MS-DOS environment. When Berkley Software developed the GEOS graphical user interface line of products for the Commodore 64 and 64C some years ago, a resurgence of sales surfaced for Commodore, but that subsided to the point where mass marketers like Target stores have now dropped home computers from their shelf space altogether. People just aren't buying those type of machines anymore. Hence they are also not buying the software designed to run in these environments. Sales are the source of profit and profit is the source of initiative and innovation. If we in the TI community wish to stay alive, then we had better start supporting the folks that are trying to stay with us. -CHILDRESS PHOTOGRAPHY CONTRACT: Jim Childress probably made a lot of money from Texas Instruments back in the days of the 99/4A. I have maybe twenty 8" x 10" color photos that his firm did of the 99/4A and its peripherals that show the Home Computer off in its best light. The Lubbock, Texas photography shop did many, many more. Unfortunately, they just recently cleared out their remaining inventory of 99/4A stuff and "threw it in the trash" because it had been too many years since Childress and TI did business. Mr. Childress told me there were about 700 photos in the lot that got tossed! -COMPUTER 99/4A: Anyone who owns one of the beige colored plastic consoles can attest to the fact that they don't have a TI-99/4A label on them like our more familiar black and silver consoles do. Instead, they are called the "Texas Instruments Computer 99/4A". This naming change seems to have been adopted company wide in 1983 because all TI references to the 99/8 also show up as "Computer 99/8" rather than the TI-99/8 name most of us use. If you look at photos of the Computer 99/4A and the Hex-Bus peripherals that TI had planned for late '83 release you can see why the console color was changed...it was done to match the color of the peripherals. But virtually everything else was changed in color too, including the TI joysticks, the cassette recorder, the Panasonic Color Monitor, the modem and even the facing of the Peripheral Expansion Box. Placed together, they made a very attractive setup. Texas Instruments advertised Computer 99/4A as; "Now with state-of-the-art styling. Sleek, compact, low-profile design and a comfortable, efficient, well-organized keyboard with full-travel, sculptured keys". I've no idea how many Computer 99/4As were manufactured, but they seem to be rather hard to find. They were officially introduced at the June 1983 Consumer Electronics Show, and TI continued to produce consoles into 1984 to complete production runs, but I have never seen a "number" anywhere that indicates how many beige consoles were produced. I did learn from the late John Guion's P-Gram manual that some (but not all) of the beige consoles were produced with what TI called "Quality Improved" circuitry, which was TI's way of saying they changed the internal workings so that unlicensed third-party modules wouldn't run. But I don't know if this means that some beige consoles will run third-party cartridge programs and some will not. I've always operated under the impression that they would not, because even 1983 Atarisoft ads state that some of their games will not run on consoles with the 2.2 operating system. -CORCOMP PHOENIX (aka CC-99/64): Shortly after the "bailout" by TI the promise of a new compatible computer for the millions who purchased the TI-99/4A loomed on the horizon. The computer was to be manufactured by CorComp of Laguna Hills, California. They fed us information based upon an idea rather than anything that even closely resembled a product and we ate it up in our eagerness to want to believe that it was all true. Dana Webb, then president of CorComp, first told us that the 99/64, aka the "Phoenix", would have two cartridge slots, but that was changed to three before the hoax ended. He told us the computer would have RS232, Disk Manager, 256 X 256 X 3 display resolution capabilities, and it would have Extended Basic, Speech, and ten octaves of sound generating as many as five voices built in to it. He even went so far as to say that the Phoenix would be offered with your choice of four different keyboards; a membrane style for kids, a calculator or chicklet style for young students, a standard style keyboard for general use and word processing and finally a keyboard with a numeric keypad. And we bought it all, the whole banana! The whole joke was so real at the time that advertisements actually existed from companies who thought they were going to distribute the new computer! Hah! Corcomp never even got to the alpha stage with the project, no less having a beta version available. Boy were we suckers! -DATAX: This was a company best known for it's TI-123, Da-Tax Auditor and The Brain programs. It was owned by Julian Achim, who apparently had some business relationship with a gentleman named Mike Bergen. I mention Bergen because he is the person who announced to the TI World in June 1985 that Datax was leaving the TI market and all of its software was being placed in the public domain. A short time later the whole story was retracted though. Wonder what was behind that? I ordered the Da-Tax Auditor in October 1986 (I sent my money in like a dummy) and made several telephone calls over the next four months trying to find out why it never showed up. Finally, in January 1987 someone picked up the telephone and it turned out to be Mr. Achim. When I asked him about the status of my 4-month old order, he very calmly replied that he was busy working on the IBM version of the program and I would have to wait. I did get the program eventually, and it was also received in time for me to do my 1986 taxes. Nevertheless, I cried no tears when the company moved to Florida in October 1987 and eventually left the TI market. -J and KH SOFTWARE: Jim Hollendar was one of the early "gurus" in TI assembly language who tried to pass his knowledge on to others and in many instances did, through the SXB Newsletter. The Arlington, VA firm also gave us Video Titles I, II, Video Titles II Accelerator, Video Titles III, the Video Titles Combo, Super EXtended Basic and Multi-Disk Informer. I don't know if Mr. Hollendar is still in the 99/4A support business, but we haven't seen nor heard from him in several years. -MICROpendium's SPECIAL BROCHURE: How many 99ers found out about the existence of MICROpendium from another magazine? I did. I found what turned out to be John and Laura's only Compute! advertisement in the June 1985 issue of Compute! on page 105. I sent away for the free "Special Brochure" they offered and the rest is history. I've been a loyal reader ever since. The Special Brochure consisted of 8 pages of material excerpted from existing issues of MICROpendium, done in the same newsprint material that has been the magazine's hallmark from day one. I might have to send it to the Smithsonian for preservation though, since it and all of my earlier issues are fading badly, despite the dry climate here. -MYARC GENEVE 9640: Myarc did of course release the Geneve, but never as a fully functional computer. Although it was originally intended to be a standalone computer, as we know it turned out to be a computer on a card, usable only by owners of the Peripheral Expansion Box (PEB). Myarc struggled to make something out of nothing with the Geneve, with next to nothing as far as financial resources. The fate of the 9640, the world's oldest incomplete computer, seems to be sealed now that Myarc has officially closed its doors. -NAVARONE INDUSTRIES: The California, no Texas, no California firm that produced some great products, but who never could find anyone who knew how to write, no less who knew how to spell! I don't think they ever did produce a truly professional instruction manual for any product they released, as long as they were in business. Even their Homework Helper manual has the photo of the TI on its cover reversed so that the cartridge port is on the left side of the computer. Nice touch, huh? -OLYMPIC SPONSORSHIP: I'll bet you don't remember that TI was the "Offical Computer and Calculator Supplier of the 1980 Olympic Winter Games"? It was, and the fact is proudly touted on many of the flyers and brochures that TI produced in 1979 and 1980. No doubt it cost them several million to do so. -PHA 2500 SPEECH MODULES: These little known cartridges were designed to slip into the Speech Synthesizer to add new words to the device's vocabulary. In case you ever wondered, that's why the front of the Speech Synthesizer has a hinged top. But TI cancelled these cartridges in December 1981 and placed an official addendun announcing so in with all Speech Editor Command Modules and Speech Synthesizers sold after that date. -R/D COMPUTING NEWSLETTER: Bruce Ryan's newsletter was designed for the hardware gurus of the TI Community and appears to have failed from the lack of an adequate subscriber base. As far as I know, there were 23 issues of the newsletter produced, which started in late 1985 and ran through mid-1987. He may have left a few people holding the bag when he shut Ryte Data operations down, but he did at least do us the courtesy of warning readers before-hand. -SUPER SALES: In January 1982 Texas Instruments mailed a huge (14.5" x 11") 8-page flyer to all registered 99/4 owners offering 10% off your order of $100 or more of software, 10% off the price of a Solid State Speech Synthesizer and your choice of $25 worth of software when you bought the 99/4A Home Computer (presumably as an upgrade/replacement to your 99/4) for the bargain basement price of $449. The flyer listed over 100 software programs for sale as well as the soon to be obsolete RS232 Standalone Unit, Disk Drive Controller and 32K Memory Expansion Unit. Pretty clever way to reduce obsolete inventory, don't you think? Oh yes, the offer expired Feb 28, 1982. -TC-99: Remember this snazzy looking piece of hardware? I do. When I spotted its picture in MICROpendium my heart was pumping with great anticipation of a real TI-99 replacement until I read the article that went with the picture. Unfortunately, TexComp's TC-99 PC look-alike was a glamorous looking shell with only a Corcomp 9900 Micro Expansion System for the guts. But even worse, it was only an experiment and never intended for full production. Talk about building myself up for a fall? I kind of wish Jerry Price had produced the TC-99 anyway. I'd have bought one just for the looks. -TEXNET: Funny, how we seem to have forgotten all about this pioneer telecommunications effort specifically for the TI-99 Community? It was first announced in Source World magazine in December 1980, but didn't actually go on-line until October 23, 1981. Nonetheless, it proved to be a marvelous forum for 99ers during its heyday and to this day is the only commercial on-line information service that could display graphics on the screen. -TI COMPUTER CAREL: These 5.5' high by 4.0' wide pieces of furniture were used to show off the 99/4A, Expansion system and various cartridge programs, much like you see Nintendo and Sega do today for their systems. They were originally manufactured for the Consumer Electronics Shows that took place in Chicago and Las Vegas, but also appeared at the 99er Magazine TI-Fest in November 1982 in San Francisco. Word has it that Texas Instruments sort of got dragged into TI-Fest and once committed, pumped a ton of bucks into the show in order to make sure it was not a flop. I honestly don't know how true that is, but it makes for interesting conjecture. -TI SOFTWARE SHOWCASE: Here again, furniture for use by TI's marketing department at the CES shows. This cabinet was also approximately 5.5 feet by 4.0 feet and deep enough to hold four software packages per rack for a total of 144 products per showcase in 6 by 6 layouts. The photo I have of this display case suggests that it was introduced in late 1982 or early 1983 because all of the software displayed is packaged in the plastic cover/plastic tray that superceded the more common 1043601-1 packaging most 99ers are familiar with. I don't know where "goodies" like this go when computers die, but I'm told that both Mike Wright of Salem, NH, and Joy Warner of Mt. Baldy, CA have rooms full of TI-99/4A showcase furniture. -TIGERCUB SOFTWARE: Founded by retired military officer Jim Peterson, Tigercub Software was probably best known for the "Tips From Tigercub" articles that kept many a User Group newsletter alive. Peterson issued his first "Tips..." article in June 1983 and as far as I know continued to write until his untimely death on January 12, 1994. He leaves a void in the TI Community that cannot be filled. -TRITON TURBO XT BRIDGE BOX: Remember this Craig Miller produced piece of hardware? It was an impressive looking device that connected your TI-99/4A console to a PC Clone chassis called the Triton Turbo XT. It appeared on the scene in March 1987 after a lot of secretive fanfare and speculation, mostly initiated by Craig Miller himself. He announced an un-named product that he had produced for a "major American company" on the TI SIGs like CompuServe's TI Forum. When the dust settled, the product turned out to be the Bridge Box. When Triton first offered the Turbo XT one could purchase it with the standard PC keyboard, or with the Bridge Box. For reasons unknown to me, they would not sell the Bridge Box separately. It was an either or situation. The $499.95 Turbo XT came with one or the other, but not both, not at any price. By the Summer of 1989 though, you could buy the Bridge Box for $29.95 since Triton had stopped selling the Turbo XT and all of the related PC products. I wish I had bought one, just as a curiosity, but I didn't. Guess I'll have to be content with the pictures in my catalogs. THINGS THAT NEVER WERE: -The DEMON ATTACK cartridge that was supposed to be ported to the 99/4A according to Charles LaFara's September 1983 Enthusiast 99 article on new software for the 99/4A. Yes we got Super Demon Attack, but we never saw the original Rob Fulop authored Demon Attack program that generated $15 million in sales for Imagic in the first three months of its life. -The sophisticated DATA BASE MANAGER that Corcomp was supposed to release which was designed to take advantage of their "memory" cards. Remember the DBMS, word processor and spreadsheet they promised. The word processor promised probably ended up as WriterEase and the spreadsheet likely ended up as Console Calc (aka TI Planner), but the DBM never made it in any form. Most likely reason is because Galen Read was supposed to write it for them, but he "left town". -IUG's REPROGRAMMABLE CARTRIDGE LIBRARY: Remember the claim by Charles LaFara that John Phillips' D Station program was only the first of many titles to come in the IUG cartridge library that was to be based upon the Romox Edge Connector Programmable Cartridge (ECPC)? Many of the titles that may have been planned for the IUG's ECPC library showed up in March 1985 under the Exceltec (aka Sunware) banner. Shortly thereafter, May 1985, the IUG went belly up. - The MECC educational programs that were to be written for the 99/4A in 1982 and scheduled for a fourth quarter 1982 release. According to the June-December 1982 TI Price List, the titles were: Astronomy, Elementary Economics, Elementary Math and Science, Exploring, Math Practice, Metric and Counting, Natural Science, Science Facts, Social Science, Teacher's Tool Box and Word Beginnings. According to Ms. Terry Leonard, who is one of only a handful of MECC employees who worked there in 1983, neither the MECC-TI agreement, nor the reason for its cancellation were common knowledge among the troops. So it looks like whatever dark secrets lurk behind the decision to drop the MECC products will apparently stay hidden forever. -The "Programming Language" that DATAX was considering developing. It was to be a high level language that would appeal to the inexperienced user, but it was not going to be anything like Forth or Basic. Looks like it turned out to be just like ZIP, NADA, RIEN, nothing! .PL 1 @