Late entrants

By 1983, the computer market was beginning to shake out. Companies that were late trying to introduce their own platform (as opposed to building clones to run an existing operating system, such as CP/M or MS-DOS) found it hard to generate enough sales to encourage software development for their machines.

Three such products caught in this cycle were the Texas Instruments TI-99 4/A (which almost bankrupted the company), the Timex-Sinclair 1000 and the Coleco Adam.