The article doesn't mention the TI 770 and later 771 Intelligent Terminal which were based on the TMS9900. The 771 with two 8" floppy drives is shown in this brochure:
The 770 was oriented toward business forms and interaction built with TI's TPL 700 (Terminal Programming Language).
I put the 770 and TPL to good use at Tymshare in the 1970s. I'd been called down to our Houston office to design and build yet another prompt-and-response Teletype UI for one of our business customers.
Being in Texas, the office just happened to have a TI 770 in a back room. When I saw it, I stayed up all night and used TPL to implement our data input forms onscreen instead of the Teletype interaction.
Our sales guy loved it, and more importantly, so did our customers. The app went on to make the company a good bit of money for those days.
One thing I didn't find in my web search: a TPL manual! If anyone finds one, please post it in a reply. Thanks!
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ti/terminal...
The 770 was the terminal part only, with tape cartridge drives in the two bays above the keyboard:
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ti/terminal...
They are the same machine other than the storage.
Here's a look at the inside:
https://forums.atariage.com/topic/312144-ti-771-intelligent-...
The 770 was oriented toward business forms and interaction built with TI's TPL 700 (Terminal Programming Language).
I put the 770 and TPL to good use at Tymshare in the 1970s. I'd been called down to our Houston office to design and build yet another prompt-and-response Teletype UI for one of our business customers.
Being in Texas, the office just happened to have a TI 770 in a back room. When I saw it, I stayed up all night and used TPL to implement our data input forms onscreen instead of the Teletype interaction.
Our sales guy loved it, and more importantly, so did our customers. The app went on to make the company a good bit of money for those days.
One thing I didn't find in my web search: a TPL manual! If anyone finds one, please post it in a reply. Thanks!