Texas Instruments TI-990 Page

The above picture is my Texas Instruments TI-990/4 system. I have a TI-990/10 system with 256K of memory, DS10 disk and 911 VDT. A TI-990/12 system with 1MB of memory, SCSI disk and 9-track tape, and a CI403 serial multiplexor for terminals. I also have TI-990/5 and TI-990/10A CPU boards that I can swap between the systems.

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, in 1979, 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.

Commercial and Military users: If you find this software useful (or necessary) please feel free to drop some coins my way to support the effort. Also, If you no longer have the in-house expertise for the support of these products please contact me for a quote.

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. I'm looking for DX10 RPG and a DX10 Fortran installation.

If you have ANY documentation for the 990/12 Writeable Control Store Assembler and Language or the EI990 Ethernet Programming Manual, I'd love to get a copy.

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

• asm990 - Version 2.4.6: A Cross Assembler for the TI-990. It is written in 'C' and runs on Linux/Unix and Windows. This version includes the addition of Macro processing and a new switch for TXMIRA mode (-t) and now defaults to SDSMAC mode.

• lnk990 - Version 2.3.2: A Cross Linker for the TI-990. It is written in 'C' and runs on Linux/Unix and Windows. This version supports libraries, DSEGs and CSEGs.

• lnked990 - Version 1.3.5: A Cross Linkage Editor for the TI-990 and uses an SDSLNK compatible control file. It is written in 'C' and runs on Linux/Unix and Windows. This version supports procedures, overlays, libraries, DSEGs and CSEGs.

• sim990 - Version 3.6.0: A TI-990 simulator. It implements the TMS-9900, TI-990/10, TI-990/10a and TI-990/12 instructions and it can boot Unix V6, UCSD Pascal, TX990, DOCS, DX10 and DNOS. Supported devices: EIA Serial Terminal/Printer, 9902/9903/CI402 Serial Terminal/Printer, CI401 Serial Terminal, CI403 Serial Terminal/Printer, Parallel Printer, Card Reader, Card Punch, FD800 Floppy Disk, 911 VDT and TILINE Disk and Tape. Also, TI ASR 733, 931 and 940 VDT serial terminal emulation.

  Due to popular demand: I've got a Windows compiled version of the simulator. This version was built under MinGW/Msys on a Windows 8 system. The zip file contains the simulator (Version 3.3.0), configuration file and two DS50 disk images (DX10 3.7 system image and a user disk). You then unzip the image, CD to the sim990win directory and enter:

  sim990 -msc 12 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 1.5.1: 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. The floppy utilities now support the UCSD Pascal format. This page gives serial port setup information to use the disk, floppy and rom dump utilities.

You will want some software to run with the sim990 program:

• DNOS system disk is Version 1.3.0 with COBOL 3.5, PASCAL 1.8, FORTRAN-78 1.3.0, RPG-II 2.2.0 and more that have been installed. These are DS50 disk images that have been patched for Y2K. These disk images will have the latest corrections and additions. Thanks to Howard Wulf for providing the initial DNOS disk images.

  DNOS 1.3.0 System TAR ball of both disks and the configuration file.
  DNOS 1.3.0 System ZIP file of both disks and the configuration file.
  

  Each file in the above archives:
  DNOS 1.3.0 System Disk
  DNOS 1.3.0 Configuration
  User Disk

• DNOS system disk is Version 1.2.1 with COBOL 3.5, PASCAL 1.8, FORTRAN-78 1.3.0, RPG-II 2.2.0 and more that have been installed. These are DS50 disk images that have been patched for Y2K. These disk images will have the latest corrections and additions. Thanks to Howard Wulf for providing the initial DNOS disk images.

  DNOS 1.2.1 System TAR ball of both disks and the configuration file.
  DNOS 1.2.1 System ZIP file of both disks and the configuration file.
  

  Each file in the above archives:
  DNOS 1.2.1 System Disk
  DNOS 1.2.1 Configuration
  User Disk

• DX10 system disk is Version 3.7.0 with COBOL 3.5, PASCAL 1.8, SORTMRG 3.1 and more that have been installed. These are DS50 disk images, system and user, and configuration that are included in the sim990 Windows distribution (above). Also, the system has been patched for Y2K. These disk images will have the latest corrections and additions.

  DX10 3.7.0 System TAR ball of both disks and the configuration file.
  DX10 3.7.0 System ZIP file of both disks and the configuration file.
  

  Each file in the above archives:
  DX10 3.7.0 System Disk
  DX10 3.7.0 Configuration
  User Disk

• Unix V6 Version 1.3.1.

  V6 Unix 1.3.1 TAR ball of a DS50 disk image, README and the configuration file.
  V6 Unix 1.3.1 source Source TAR ball. This contains everything you need to build the system.
  

• 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.
  Here is a link to the FOCAL source written in Pascal for DX10.

• 733 ASR TXDS System This system is the standard TXDS system shipped by TI.

• forth990 - Version 1.0.2: A TI-990 version of Forth.

• MPP - The TI Micro Processor Pascal (MPP) archive. Thanks to Lothar Paltins for providing these FD800 images.

• UCSD Pascal - The UCSD Pascal archive of FD800 floppy images.

The following is a link for the MicroGate 931 VDT emulator for Windoze:

• mg931 - - The terminal emulator.

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 and TMS-9900. There are also runtime libraries (libc.a, libm.a, etc.) that can be built with the compiler. The instructions to download and install it are here: TI-990 GCC installation.