Computing and Mathematics

Texas Instruments was responsible for a dizzying array of electronic innovations over the remainder of the twentieth century. In the early 1950s, under Haggerty’s leadership, TI started a semiconductor division and created the first transistor radio in the world. With its coffers swelling from the shift to electronics, TI made huge leaps in the use of transistors for computing. In 1952, Gordon Teal, who had left Bell Labs to join TI, helped create the first commercial silicon transistor. In 1958, TI produced the integrated circuit, which transformed computing. In addition to commercial innovations such as the first handheld computer, TI continued to manufacture military equipment and paved the way for a burgeoning field of consumer electronics.

This photograph, dated approximately 1968, shows Jack Kilby holding an early circuit board that used integrated circuits.

Texas Instruments produced the first commercial silicon transistors in 1954. This sketch comes from the notebook of Mort Jones. The arrow points to a small bar cut from a junction silicon crystal grown by TI.

Texas Instruments played a key role in the miniaturization of computer technology, which paved the way for smaller, consumer-friendly devices. In 1954, TI produced the first silicon transistor. Shown here, the transistor appears on a peanut shell to demonstrate its small scale.

In 1971, Michael Cochran, an engineer at TI, invented a single-chip microcontroller. Also called a calculator-on-a-chip, it paved the way for TI to manufacture calculators.

The Advanced Scientific Computer (ASC) was another technological milestone of Texas Instruments. The work for this supercomputer began in 1965, and within six years it had been installed at Austin. ASC introduced vector computing, which applies instructions to an array of data, not just one point.

Texas Instruments developed the Digital Signal Processor in 1982. This model from 1999 had almost 70,000 transistors. TI boasted that this integrated circuit could operate at 33 million floating-point operations per second.