Texas Instruments (TI) 990 Page

Welcome to Dave Pitts' TI 990 web page. The above picture is my Texas Instruments (TI) 990/4 system that I have at home. I also have a TI-990/10 system with 256K of memory, DS10 disk and 911 VDT. I worked on the TI-990 from its inception, wire wrapped boards in a TI-960 chassis, until 1980. The first 990 was the 990/9 in 1973 and was built for a large Motel chain reservation system. I worked on the cross development environment for the Motel that ran on their PDP-10 and was written in ALGOL. The 990/9 was superceeded by the 990/10 and became commercialized with memory mapping and high speed disks on the TILINE (kind of like DEC's UNIBUS). The 990/4 came out with the advent of the TMS-9900 chip in 1975. The 990/4 was superceeded by the 990/5 (added the TILINE, more memory and three on board serial ports). The 990/12 was added to the product line and added hardware floating point, writeable control store and many other "goodies". I wrote and collaborated on parts of the Operating Systems (TX990 and DX10) and various utility programs, editors, compilers, assemblers and linkers.

Should you have any TI 990 software and documentation, please drop me a note as I would like to preserve it and make it available for others.

In seeing some of the retrocomputing effort on behalf of the TI 990 I've got some links that may be of interest:

asm990 - A Cross Assembler for the TI 990. It is written in 'C' and runs on Linux. Version 1.4.8: Many improvements including conditional assembly, revamped expression parser (now supports logical expressions) and 990/12 support.
lnk990 - A Cross Linker for the TI 990. It is written in 'C' and runs on Linux. Version 1.3.2: This version adds library support.
sim990 - A TI 990 simulator. Version 1.5.7: It implements the TMS-9900 and TI-990/10 instructions with interrupts and it can boot TX990, DOCS and DX10. Supported devices: Serial terminal, Serial printer, Card Reader, FD800 floppy disks, 911 VDT and TILINE Disk and Tape.
Due to popular demand: I've got a Windows compiled version of the simulator. The zip file contains the simulator, configuration file and two DS50 disk images (DX10 3.7 system image and a user disk). You then unzip the image, CD to the simwin directory and enter:
sim990 -msc 10 512K dx10.cfg
You can then telnet to the simulator on port 2000. You need to turn off Function key processing in your telnet client for proper operation. You then enter F10 (Gold) followed by ! (Exclamation point) to start SCI. You will need a third party Telnet program for Windows that supports ANSI terminal controls and Funtion keys. The native Telnet that comes with Windows does not support ANSI operation.
Utilities - Version 1.1.4: These are utilities that I used to extract the disk and floppy images from my 990 systems, floppy directory list and file reader, generate TILINE disk files, disk data dump and an object disassembler.

You will want some "disks" to run with the sim990 program:

These are DS50 disk images, system and user, and configuration that are included in the sim990 Windows distribution (above). The system disk is Version 3.7.0 of DX10 and has COBOL 3.5, PASCAL 1.8 and SORTMRG 3.1 installed. Also, the system has been patched for Y2K.
DX10 3.7.0 System
DX10 3.7.0 User
DX10 3.7.0 Configuration
DX10 3.2.3 System This is a DS10 system image. This disk has a preinstalled COBOL compiler and SORT/MERGE.
DX10 3.3.0 System This is a DS10 system image.
DX10 3.6.0 System This is a DS50 system image.
DX10 3.7.0 System This is a WD500 system image.
DX10 BASIC This is the BASIC 3.1.0 installation disk on a DS10 image.
DX10 COBOL This is the COBOL 3.2.1 and SORT/MERGE 3.1.1 installation disk on a DS10 image.
DX10 TPL This is the TPL 1.1.0 installation disk on a DS10 image.
DX10 3780/2780 This is the 3780/2780 Communications 4.0.0 installation disk on a DS10 image.
DX10 TI FORMS This is the TIFORMS 2.0.0 installation disk on a DS10 image.
DX10 PASCAL This is the PASCAL 1.8.0G installation tape.
DX10 COBOL and TIPE This is the COBOL 3.5.0J and TIPE 2.1.0C installation tape.
DOCS System This is a DS10 system image with the DOCS diagnostics suite.
TXDS System This system has my command line control program and VT100 CRT DSR. Also, SYSUTL was patched to allow current Y2K years. Sysgen also includes two disks, line printer and card reader.
911VDT TXDS System This system has my command line control program. Also, SYSUTL was patched to allow current Y2K years. Sysgen also includes two disks, line printer and card reader.
TX990 Fortran IV Standard TX990/TXDS Fortran IV distribution. Thanks to Lothar Paltins for providing this FD800 image.
990 Focal System This image has a bootable FOCAL interpreter.
733 ASR TXDS System This system is the standard TXDS system shipped by TI.
FORTH System - The FD800 FORTH boot image, doesn't require interrupts.
FORTH data - The FD800 FORTH data image.
MPP - The TI Micro Processor Pascal (MPP) archive. Thanks to Lothar Paltins for providing these FD800 images.

If you need Documentation for the TI 990 here is a link:

TI 990 Documentation at bitsavers.org

I've also been working on a GCC port to the TI-990. The instructions to download and install it are here: TI-990 GCC installation.

This home page is maintained by David Pitts. Please email with comments and corrections.
Last modified 2008/06/04.