I’ve been working on developing an operating system for the TI-99 for the last 18 months or so. I didn’t intend this—my original plan was to develop enough of the standard C libraries to help with writing cartridge-based and EA5 programs. But that trek led me quickly towards developing an OS. As Unix is by far my preferred OS, this OS is an approximation. Developing an OS within the resources available, particularly the RAM, has been challenging, but also surprisingly doable.
↫ UNIX99 forum announcement post
We’re looking at a quite capable UNIX for the TI-99, with support for its sound, speech, sprites, and legacy 9918A display modes, GPU-accelerated scrolling, stdio (for text and binary files) and stdin/out/err support, a shell (of course), multiple user support, cooperative tasks support, and a ton more. And remember – all of this is running on a machine with a 16-bit processor running at 16MHz and a mere 16KB of RAM.
Absolutely wild.
The TI-99/4A was my very first computer at six years old in 1983. Apparently my father had had a good year at work and he was able to splurge on us that Christmas. I was told I could have a bunch of less expensive toys, or a computer and nothing else. So of course I said I wanted a computer! I had no idea what I would get until I opened it Christmas morning, and I vividly remember telling my little brother who I shared a room with that the TV was now “mine” when I needed to “do computer stuff” which of course started a fight.
I learned BASIC on that computer, and I don’t remember when it happened but some time in the next two years we had a lightning strike that destroyed a lot of appliances in the house, including my beloved computer. It was around that time that my parents separated and eventually divorced, and I didn’t get another computer of my own until a few years later when I bought my neighbor’s RadioShack CoCo 2 for $50. I was 18 years old before I had my first x86 computer, a graduation present from that same estranged father.
I still miss the TI computer though, the sense of wonder and discovery when I got my first program to run! I’d love to get my hands on one and follow along with this project.