Texas Instruments: Seismic Oil Hunting, the Speak and Spell and the TI-84

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Texas Instruments began in 1930 as Geophysical Service Incorporated, which set off dynamite and read seismic reflections to help oil companies find deposits. In World War II it applied the same signal processing to submarine detection gear for the U.S. Navy. It reorganized as Texas Instruments in 1951 after finding General Instruments taken, paid Western Electric $25,000 in 1952 for a transistor patent license and hired Bell Labs chemist Gordon Teal, whose team produced the first commercial silicon transistor in 1954. That year TI helped create the Regency TR-1, the first commercial transistor radio, using cheaper germanium, and in September 1958 Jack Kilby demonstrated the integrated circuit, work that later won the 2000 Nobel Prize in physics.

TI built a three-pound handheld calculator prototype, the Cal Tech, in 1967, patented the first single-chip microprocessor in 1973 and released the Speak and Spell in 1978. Its TI-99/4A home computer shipped 5,000 units a day by late 1982, yet TI left the home PC market by the end of 1983. Its defense arm developed forward-looking infrared, terrain-following radar and Paveway laser guidance before TI sold it to Raytheon in 1997 for nearly $3 billion. Today analog chips and embedded processors bring in over 80% of revenue, a position strengthened by the $6.5 billion purchase of National Semiconductor in 2011.

• In the 1960s TI worked on Project Vela, detecting Soviet underground nuclear tests.
• The Speak and Spell used linear predictive coding to model the human vocal tract and synthesize speech on one chip.
• Calculators are under 3% of revenue, and a TI-84 Plus costs an estimated $15 to $20 to make while selling for over $100.
• The TI-83's Z80 processor let students code games shared on ticalc.org, and in 2009 TI sent DMCA takedown notices after hobbyists published its signing keys.
• TI invented DLP in 1987, a chip of microscopic mirrors used in many digital cinema projectors.