The Texas Instruments Professional Computer (abbreviated TIPC or TI PC) and the Texas Instruments Professional Portable Computer (TIPPC) are personal computers produced by

Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globa ...

that were both released on January 31, 1983, and discontinued around 1985; the TIPC is a desktop PC and the TIPPC is a portable version that is fully compatible with it. Both computers were most often used by white-collar information workers and professionals that needed to gather, manipulate and transmit information.

Features and specifications

The TIPC is very similar to the

IBM PC The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a tea ...

both architecturally and from a user-experience perspective, with some technically superior aspects. It is based on the

Intel 8088 The Intel 8088 ("''eighty-eighty-eight''", also called iAPX 88) microprocessor is a variant of the Intel 8086. Introduced on June 1, 1979, the 8088 has an eight-bit external Bus (computing), data bus instead of the 16-bit computing, 16-bit bus of ...

CPU and an optional

Intel 8087 The Intel 8087, announced in 1980, was the first x87 floating-point coprocessor for the 8086 line of microprocessors. The purpose of the 8087 was to speed up computations for floating-point arithmetic, such as addition, subtraction, multiplicati ...

floating point coprocessor. It supports

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few oper ...

compatible operating systems, but is not a fully

IBM PC compatible IBM PC compatible computers are similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT, all from computer giant IBM, that are able to use the same software and expansion cards. Such computers were referred to as PC clones, IBM clones or IBM PC clones ...

computer. Alternative operating systems are

CP/M-86 CP/M-86 was a version of the CP/M operating system that Digital Research (DR) made for the Intel 8086 and Intel 8088. The system commands are the same as in CP/M-80. Executable files used the relocatable .CMD file format. Digital Research al ...

Concurrent CP/M-86 MP/M (Multi-Programming Monitor Control Program) is a discontinued multi-user version of the CP/M operating system, created by Digital Research developer Tom Rolander in 1979. It allowed multiple users to connect to a single computer, each u ...

, and the

UCSD p-System UCSD Pascal is a Pascal programming language system that runs on the UCSD p-System, a portable, highly machine-independent operating system. UCSD Pascal was first released in 1977. It was developed at the University of California, San Diego (UC ...

. The TIPC was reviewed in ''

Byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

'' magazine in its December 1983 issue. The CPU clocked at 5 MHz (a bit faster than the 4.77 MHz of the IBM PC) and has 64 KB of RAM pre-installed. A RAM board can be installed in an expansion slot providing an additional 192 KB or RAM, for a maximum of 256 KB. A later version supports up to 768 KB of total memory. The computer featured 5 expansion slots and has either a 12-inch green-phosphor monochrome (

CRT CRT or Crt may refer to: Science, technology, and mathematics Medicine and biology * Calreticulin, a protein *Capillary refill time, for blood to refill capillaries *Cardiac resynchronization therapy and CRT defibrillator (CRT-D) * Catheter-re ...

) monitor or a 12-inch color monitor with a color graphics resolution of 720x300 pixels. For text, the display shows 25 lines of 80 columns each. The device has a 5¼-inch

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined ...

drive and can support a second floppy drive or a "Winchester" hard drive without requiring the use of an expansion slot or separate chassis, and typically features one of each. ''Byte'' said the keyboard, which has a different layout for the arrow keys and is quieter than the IBM PC, was "well, wonderful". The keyboard has 57 typewriter keys, 5 cursor control keys, 12 function keys and a separate 18-key numeric keypad area. The keyboard has "infinite height adjustment from 5 to 15 degrees slope and connects to the system unit with a telephone-type coiled cord so you can position the key board for greatest comfort (even use it in your lap)". The computer also has the capability to map the keyboard keys to characters to support arbitrary user customization of the keyboard layout. The keyboard ordinarily supports 256 distinct characters to enable international use, and the character set can be expanded to 512 characters for special-purpose applications. A light is provided to indicate uppercase mode selection.

Speech synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...

and

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the ma ...

were added after the initial release, including support of natural-language queries with a

relational database A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relatio ...

Promotion

TI was the first company to release

videotape Videotape is magnetic tape used for storing video and usually sound in addition. Information stored can be in the form of either an analog or digital signal. Videotape is used in both video tape recorders (VTRs) and, more commonly, videocasse ...

training videos for their computers.

References

External links

TI PPC
at Old-Computers.com : The Museum. Accessed 10 February 2015. Professional Computer Microcomputers {{Microcompu-stub