Texas Instruments TMS9900 - First True 16-bit Microprocessor

About this Artwork This artwork is a mixed media display celebrating the Texas Instruments TMS9900. Introduced in 1976, the TMS9900 was based on the Texas Instruments 990 minicomputer. Like its minicomputer parent, the TMS9900 had very efficient register-to-register computation and memory-to-memory data transfers. The TMS9900 had no general registers on board, but used external RAM memory instead. This allowed the TMS9900 to deal with more interrupts and handle the context switches much more quickly. The architecture provided a very clean and flexible programming model. The TMS9900 was also used in TI's TI-99/4 and TI-99/4A microcomputers.The first 16-bit microprocessor was the National Semiconductor PACE. However, while the PACE could handle data in 16-bit chunks and had 16-bit accumulators it still had many internal architectural aspects of an 8-bit orientation. The PACE was designed to run in 8-bit and 16-bit modes, but was optimized for the 8-bit mode. The TMS9900 being derived fro