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Comment by arundelo | Hacker News Reader

(Not relevant to this demo in particular, just a piece of trivia I only learned in the past few years:) It makes sense to think of the TI-99 as part of the 8-bit microcomputer boom of the 1980s (Commodore 64, Apple II, TRS-80), but it actually had a 16-bit processor! (Which communicated with most of the rest of the computer through an 8-bit bus.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A#Fir...

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The contemporary of the Apple II and TRS-80 was the Commodore PET. The C64 came much later.

I'm talking about 8-bit microcomputers in general, from the late seventies to the mid-to-late eighties:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_computer#Notable_home_com...

EDIT: I owned a Commodore 64 and a TRS-80 in the eighties, and used an Apple IIe at school. These were all programmable in Basic, and although the C64 was clearly the most powerful, they were all similar in power compared to, say, an Amiga.

The Amiga used the 68K so it was more powerful than the previous microcomputers that were mostly 6502 (some Z80).

Although to be fair, when referring solely to BASIC performance, MS's AmigaBasic was complete trash.

Yeah, 16-bit data bus but only 16-bit address bus. So still has the limitation of 64k memory which was really the chief defect of machines of that era.

I wouldn't call it a defect. It's just a limitation, which could and did get worked around to a certain extent with various bank switching schemes.

Well it was a hindrance and probably the chief reason people wanted to upgrade later to 16-bits. In reality a 6502 or Z80 at 1-3mhz with supporting circuity was probably fast enough for most people's needs, but the memory sizes and lack of 80 column displays gave those machines limited usefulness for the things people needed computers for at the time: word processing, home spreadsheets, etc.

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