ADMIT IT. You're not really a computer expert. Okay, you know all about what's at the heart of every computer - a microprocessor, of course. You've probably figured out the oblique reply to the question "But what is a home computer for?" (The correct oblique reply is "What is a piece of paper for?").
Maybe you even know enough not to get into a situation you can't handle - like trying to sing the praises of a CBM-64 to someone who owns an IBM PC. But at the end of the day there are still those bits of conversation when names are dropped or antique machines referred to that make you feel like the man who hasn't been reading the FT. No comment.
As with jujitsu, skilled micro-bluffing is all about turning aside remarks that threaten to expose your abysmal ignorance.
First, know your enemy. As with all social groups, there is a recognised pecking order among micro owners. A TI-99/4 owner, for example, is treated very often by the rest of the pack as a complete pariah. Why should this be? After all, as the distressed Texas owner often cries out whenever the pack starts circling him: "It is a 16-bit machine!".
Surely a 16-bit micro owner should be able to kick sand in the faces of mere 8-bit micro owners. But as we watch, we discover that for the Texas owner, at least, this is anything but the case.
The encounter is as horrifying in its way to the detached observer as watching a python swallow a lizard whole in a David Attenborough documentary. Nevertheless, it is instructive, since we are already deep in microbluff territory. What is the true meaning of the piteous cry of 16-bit, coming as it does in stark contrast to the rhythmic tribal grunting of "Eight-bit, eight-bit"?
We all know what a bit is, of course. Defined elsewhere as "a boringly dichotomic entity which precludes rational discussion," the bit is more precisely a binary digit. Microbuffs and microbluffers alike all learned at mother's knee that each of the elements comprising the memory of any computer is a binary system - one state denotes 0, the other state denotes 1. But this cannot help our hapless Texas owner. He is the victim of two things: architecture, and history.
First, architecture. The term eight-bit normally refers to the width of the data bus as opposed to the address bus. The job of the address bus is to access addresses in Rom or Ram. The instruction that the address refers to is sent back to the CPU via the data bus. The address bus is one way. The data bus is two way - for example the instruction the address bus got hold of might require the transference of further data from Rom or Ram, or even to the input/output ports (I/O in microjargon).
Most home computers like the Spectrum, BBC, Commodore 64 etc. are referred to as eight-bit micros. This refers to the width of the two-way data bus. And the width of the data bus determines how much information is processed in the CPU in a standard amount of time.
Obviously a true 16-bit micro ought to be able to shove twice as much through the CPU in the same standard amount of time. Just like a six-lane highway can carry twice as much traffic as a three-laner. But - and this is crucial to the TI-99/4 - big motorways can create parking problems in the city centre. For all its 16-bit architecture, only 32K of memory could be accessed by the 9900 chip deep in the heart of every Texas.
And instead of having just an address bus, data bus and control bus, like the 6502, 6809 or Z-80 chips found in most home micros, it had a separate communications register unit I/O bus as well. So it needed an expensive 64K pin package to keep everything moving around. And instead of carrying on-chip registers like conventional processors, it had blocks of work- space registers in Ram memory.
All it had on the chip was a program counter flag register and the register pointing to the current workspace. So basically it's weird. It had its uses as a dedicated chip in military aircraft and so on, but proved to be too expensive and too strange to be bought by people in large volumes - which chips have to be if they are to be worth making. So much for architecture. Now for history.
When the Texas came out over here, you could only use it with an NEXT colour monitor, so it could set you back £1000. (Did you know, by the way, that NTSC stands for Not The Same Colour twice?) It spent a long time priced at £600 in the UK, went through a peculiar phase of being sold for £200, but you could get another £50 back if you sent off a voucher, and ended its days being sold for around £80. Finally, it was withdrawn from the market.
This is a vital piece of home computer mythology, symbolising the legendary price-cuts that reward the patient. It is also a severe lesson in bad marketing. As Commodore chronicler Mike Tomczyk says of TI in his book 'The Home Computer Wars', "I figured that if a giant semi-conductor company that made its own chips charged that much money, they either didn't know how to control their manufacturing costs or were gouging profits at the consumer's expense."
So, to summarise, what the pack is conveying to its victim is basically this: "You are a sucker. You bought something that turned out to be a slightly less successful step in evolution than the Neanderthal man. Worse, you (a) paid a hell of a lot of money for it, (b) bought it for next to nothing off a scrapheap, (c) were given it for Christmas by a loveable but eccentric uncle who thinks that Prestel is a Jewish delicacy".
The pack is demonstrating its irrational but natural fear of the alien. Nearly all of them are 6502 or Z-80 based. There may be a few Dragon owners who are glad it is not their turn to be picked on. There is little the victim can do to defend himself. "To the initiated, the 9900 chip is powerful and flexible," he may call out - this is a strange mantra he has gleaned from an old copy of 'Practical Computing'.
He can point out that the mutant communications register unit I/O bus can address up to 4,096 individual bit I/O lines. But he is clutching at straws - the unique TI speech synthesizer add-on has addressed him more often than he has used the computer to address anything else.
He must divert the attention of the pack. As the baying raises to its peak, he plays his trump card. He yells, "Well, I know for a fact that George over there has got a COMX-35 at home!" and runs like hell.
