TI's Home Computer. Unbeatable value. Unrivalled software.

The original TI99/4 had been released back in 1979 and was the first ever 16-bit home computer, running TI's own TMS 9900 CPU.

An updated version was released a couple of years later, but neither were particularly successful, although to its credit TI did keep trying until 1983.

At this point, a price war - that Commodore had kicked off partly in revenge for the calculator wars of the 1970s - led to the TI-99 having its price continually reduced until "they were being sold at ridiculous levels", according to Raymond Yap of Wongs, the Hong Kong-based manufacturer of the TI-99, as well as a raft of other famous micros[source: "Go east young man", Popular Computing Weekly, 1st December 1983, p. 15].

Frequent price cuts left Texas Instruments with little or no margins on its machine - a "road to disaster" according to Yap. It got so bad that legal action was underway in the US thanks to a suit filed by a stockholder which claimed that TI was actually selling the TI-99/4A for less than it cost to make. At one point, it was selling for only $49, or about [[33|1983]] in [[now]].

Continued losses led to TI exiting the home computer market in November 1983.