Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments was founded by Cecil H. Green, J. Erik Jonsson, Eugene McDermott, and Patrick E. Haggerty in 1951. McDermott was one of the original founders of Geophysical Service Inc. (GSI) in 1930. McDermott, Green, and Jonsson were GSI employees who purchased the company in 1941. In November, 1945, Patrick Haggerty was hired as general manager of the Laboratory and Manufacturing (L&M) division, which focused on electronic equipment. By 1951, the L&M division, with its defense contracts, was growing faster than GSI's Geophysical division. The company was reorganized and initially renamed General Instruments Inc. Because there already existed a firm named General Instrument, the company was renamed Texas Instruments that same year. From 1956 to 1961, Fred Agnich of Dallas, later a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives, was the Texas Instruments president. Geophysical Service, Inc. became a subsidiary of Texas Instruments. Early in 1988 most of GSI was sold to the Halliburton Company.
Texas Instruments TMS1000
The TMS1000 is a family of microcontroller integrated circuits, introduced by Texas Instruments in 1974. It combined a 4-bit central processor unit, read-only memory (ROM), read/write memory (RAM), and input/output (I/O) lines as a complete "computer on a chip". It was intended for embedded systems in automobiles, appliances, games, and measurement instruments. It was the first high-volume commercial microcontroller. In 1974, parts in this family could be purchased in volume for around $2 each. By 1979 about 26 million parts in this family were sold every year. The TMS 1000 was used in Texas Instruments' own "Speak & Spell" educational toy, and in the electronic game Simon.