Texas Instruments
In 1930, J. Clarence Karcher and Eugene McDermott founded Geophysical Service, an early provider of seismic exploration services to the petroleum industry. In 1939, the company reorganized as Coronado Corp., an oil company with Geophysical Service Inc (GSI), now as a subsidiary. On December 6, 1941, McDermott along with three other GSI employees, J. Erik Jonsson, Cecil H. Green, and H.B. Peacock purchased GSI. During World War II, GSI expanded their services to include electronics for the U.S. Army, Signal Corps, and the U.S. Navy. In 1951, the company changed its name to Texas Instruments, with GSI becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the new company.
Texas Instruments
In 1978, Texas Instruments introduced the first single-chip LPC speech synthesizer. In 1976 TI began a feasibility study memory intensive applications for bubble memory then being developed. They soon focused on speech applications. This resulted in the development the TMC0280 one-chip linear predictive coding (LPC) speech synthesizer which was the first time a single silicon chip had electronically replicated the human voice. This was used in several TI commercial products beginning with Speak & Spell which was introduced at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in June 1978. In 2001 TI left the speech synthesis business, selling it to Sensory Inc. of Santa Clara, California.