The backstory of the Tomy Tutor is interesting. This seems like it was a tremendous longshot, financially. It’s hard to imagine how this would be greenlit in today’s age. There are so many weird architectures of the 1980s — I appreciate the quirkiness and diversity.
I believe my first "computer" could have been the toy version of the Tomy Tutor:<p><a href="https://www.nostalgianerd.com/tomy-tutor/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nostalgianerd.com/tomy-tutor/</a>
I just realized I have a 9995-based Tomy Tutor in my closet. Now that I know about this project, I'll have to dig it out. FWIW, for the two years I lived in Richardson, TX, I drove by TI mainside every day to get to work. I eventually remembered how much fun 9900 assembly was and got the vanity plate BLWP [Branch and Load Workspace Pointer], one of the most unique 9900 instructions.
Very interesting article, but the architecture seems quite odd. And the journey to cut to japan and back not helping. Still like second extinction, it showed the variety when you think odd. It also asked my earlier question about zero page architecture… lately the idea of having large cache under amd might be another evolutionary path btw.
60 years ago, I never got to debug my first assembly program, which had 1 syntax error and an unknown number of bugs, because NASA launched a weather satellite, data from which monopolized the 7090 which the high school enrichmment program was having programs run on. Still rankles a bit.