Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: What was the first home computer released by Texas Instruments?
"InfoWorld" criticized the computer's game library as mediocre. TI discouraged third-party development for the 99/4A, including games, but did not license popular arcade games like "Zaxxon" or "Frogger".
In 1977 groups within Texas Instruments were designing a video game console, a home computer to compete against the TRS-80 and Apple II, and a high-end business personal computer with a hard drive. The first two groups merged at TI's consumer products division in Lubbock, Texas; the 99/4's (according to Walden C. Rhines) "ultracheap keyboard", RF modulator, and ROM cartridges came from the console design. Others within the company persuaded the Lubbock group to use TI's TMS9900 CPU.
The world’s first transistor computer was built at the University of Manchester in November 1953. The computer was built by Richard Grimsdale, then a research student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and later a Professor of Electronic Engineering at Sussex University. The machine used point-contact transistors, made in small quantities by STC and Mullard. These consisted of a single crystal of germanium with two fine wires, resembling the crystal and cat’s whisker of the 1920s. These transistors had the useful property that a single transistor could possess two stable states. ... The development of the machine was severely hampered by the unreliability of the transistors, which consumed 150 watts.
Using the narrow definition of "operated by one person", the first personal computer was the ENIAC which became operational in 1946. It did not meet further definitions of affordable or easy to use. The Bendix G15 of 1956 was intended for use without an operating staff, and several hundred were made; it was too costly to be personally owned, however.
Throughout the rest of the 1960s, digital computer games were created by increasingly numerous programmers and sometimes sold commercially in catalogs. As the audience for video games expanded to more than a few dozen research institutions with the falling cost of computers, and programming languages that would run on multiple types of computers were created, a wider variety of games began to be developed. Video games transitioned into a new era in the early 1970s with the launch of the commercial video game industry in 1971 with the display of the coin-operated arcade game "Galaxy Game" and the release of the first arcade video game "Computer Space", and then in 1972 with the release of the immensely successful arcade game "Pong" and the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, which launched the first generation of video game consoles.
In 1983, DIAB independently developed the first UNIX-compatible machine, DIAB DS90, based on the Motorola 68000 CPU. DNIX here made its appearance, based on a UNIX System V license from AT&T. DIAB was however an industrial automation company, and needed a real-time operating system, so the company replaced the AT&T-supplied UNIX kernel with their own in-house developed, yet compatible real-time variant. Over time, the company also replaced several of the UNIX standard userspace tools with their own implementations, to the point where no code was derived from UNIX, and their machines could be deployed independently of any AT&T UNIX license. Two years later and in cooperation with Luxor, a computer called ABC 1200 was developed for the office market, while in parallel, DIAB continue to produce enhanced versions of the DS90 computer using newer versions of the Motorola CPUs such as the Motorola 68010, 68020, 68030 and eventually 68040. In 1990, after DIAB was acquired by Groupe Bull, who continued to produce and support the DS machines under the brand name "DIAB", with names such as "DIAB 2320", "DIAB 2340" etc., still running DIABs version of DNIX.
There is debate about what machine was the first personal computer, the Altair 8800 (1975), the Mark-8 (1974), or even back to Kenbak-1 (1971). The computer in the January 1975 issue of "Popular Electronics" captured the attention of the 400,000 or so readers. Before then, home computers were lucky to sell a hundred units. The Altair sold thousands in the first year. By the end of 1975 there were a dozen companies producing computer kits and peripherals using the Altair circuit bus, later renamed the S-100 bus and set as an IEEE standard.
Atari, Inc. was an American video game developer and video game console and home computer development company which operated between 1972 and 1984. During its years of operation, it developed and produced over 350 arcade, console, and computer games for its own systems, and almost 100 ports of games for home computers such as the Commodore 64. Atari began its operations by developing and producing some of the first arcade video games; the first commercial arcade video game, "Computer Space", was released in November 1971 by Atari founders Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in partnership as Syzygy Engineering. The game in part marked the end of the early history of video games and the start of the rise of the commercial video game industry. After its founding in 1972, Atari released "Pong", believed to be the third arcade video game after "Computer Space" and a clone game and the first commercially successful arcade video game machine, and thereafter produced numerous arcade games, including video games and pinball machines.
In 1959–1961 years, when Texas Instruments and Westinghouse worked in parallel on aviation "molecular electronics", their competition had a friendly character. The situation changed in 1962 when Texas Instruments started to zealously pursue the real and imaginary infringers of their patents and received the nicknames "The Dallas legal firm" and "semiconductor cowboys". This example was followed by some other companies. Nevertheless, the IC industry continued to develop no matter the patent disputes.During the patent wars of the 1960s the press and professional community in the United States recognized that the number of the IC inventors could be rather large. The book "Golden Age of Entrepreneurship" named four people: Kilby, Lehovec, Noyce and Hoerni. Sorab Ghandhi in "Theory and Practice of Microelectronics" (1968) wrote that the patents of Lehovec and Hoerni were the high point of semiconductor technology of the 1950s and opened the way for the mass production of ICs.
In 1983 National Instruments reached an organizational milestone, developing their first GPIB board to connect instruments to IBM PCs. With the arrival of the Macintosh computer, however, the company felt ready to take advantage of the new graphical interfaces. Kodosky began a research initiative with the assistance of student researchers at the University of Texas into ways to exploit the new interface. This led to the creation of NI's flagship product, the LabVIEW graphical development platform for the Macintosh computer, which was released in 1986. The software allows engineers and scientists to program graphically, by "wiring" icons together instead of typing text-based code. By allowing people to use a more intuitive, less-structured development environment, their productivity greatly increased, making LabVIEW quite popular. The following year, a version of LabVIEW, known as LabWindows, was released for the DOS environment.
The chip design started in April 1970, when Federico Faggin joined Intel, and was completed under his leadership in January 1971. The first commercial sale of the fully operational 4004 occurred in March 1971 to Busicom Corp. of Japan for which it was originally designed and built as a custom chip. In mid-November of the same year, with the prophetic ad "Announcing a new era in integrated electronics", the 4004 was made commercially available to the general market. The 4004 was the first commercially available monolithic processor, fully integrated in one small chip. Such a feat of integration was made possible by the use of the then-new silicon gate technology for integrated circuits, originally developed by Faggin (with Tom Klein) at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968, which allowed twice the number of random-logic transistors and an increase in speed by a factor of five compared to the incumbent MOS aluminum gate technology. Faggin also invented the bootstrap load with silicon gate and the “buried contact”, improving speed and circuit density compared with aluminum gate.
In 1975 Atari released Home Pong, its first of several "Pong"-based dedicated video game consoles, and in 1977 released its first home video game console, the Atari Video Computer System (later renamed the Atari 2600). From that point onward Atari developed both arcade games and console games, and in 1979 added games for their first home computers, the Atari 400 and 800. Atari produced a second home video game console in 1982, the Atari 5200, and four more home computer versions. Beginning in Summer 1981, Atari published the Atari Program Exchange, a quarterly mail-order catalog of software written for Atari computers by external developers which Atari then distributed to customers. In May 1983, Atari started the Atarisoft division, which produced ports of games by Atari and others for non-Atari home computers. In July 1984, as a result of falling sales due to the video game crash of 1983, Atari, Inc. was split apart by Warner Communications; the arcade division continued as a subsidiary of Warner under the name Atari Games, while the console and computer games divisions were sold off as Atari Corporation.
Ashton Tate held a large company wide convention aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California in early August,1984 and presented new product to hundreds of clients and staff. Right after the convention, George Tate suddenly died of a heart attack at the age of 40 on August 10, 1984. David Cole on October 29 announced his resignation and left for Ziff-Davis, leaving Ed Esber to become CEO. Cole hired Esber because he was the marketing expert who launched VisiCalc and who built the first distribution channels for personal computer software. (VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet and is credited for sparking the personal computer revolution and was the first commercially successful personal computer software package.)
While the subject of exactly which device was the first microprocessor is contentious, partly due to lack of agreement on the exact definition of the term "microprocessor", it is largely undisputed that the first single-chip microprocessor was the Intel 4004, designed and realized by Ted Hoff, Federico Faggin, and Stanley Mazor at Intel. It should be noted that Tadashi Sasaki and Masatoshi Shima of Busicom, a calculator manufacturer, had the initial insight that the CPU be a 4-bit integrated circuit, and that Intel could supply the ICs.
While the earliest microprocessor ICs literally contained only the processor, i.e. the central processing unit, of a computer, their progressive development naturally led to chips containing most or all of the internal electronic parts of a computer. The integrated circuit in the image on the right, for example, an Intel 8742, is an 8-bit microcontroller that includes a CPU running at 12 MHz, 128 bytes of RAM, 2048 bytes of EPROM, and I/O in the same chip.
In July 2009, a community-made patch was released which allowed user-made operating systems to be easily uploaded onto the TI-84 plus series. Shortly after the patch was developed, the RSA keys for the calculator's operating system were factored via the General number field sieve (GNFS) algorithm, making a software patch unnecessary. In response to this, Texas Instruments released a newer hardware revision which only accepts other, stronger RSA keys, making it harder to load user-made operating systems or older TI operating systems (2.53MP and earlier). The community has found a way around the newest limitation by discovering a way to revert to older versions of the boot code.The TI-84 Plus is based heavily on its predecessor, the TI-83 Plus. As with all other calculators in the series, the TI-84 Plus supports native Z80 assembly as well as TI's interpreted, BASIC-like language for calculators, dubbed TI-BASIC. Programming for the TI-84 Plus is nearly identical to programming for the TI-83 Plus, with a few new functions in both TI-BASIC and the calculator's assembly support that do not exist on earlier models and OS versions. Several attempts have been made at creating a C to Zilog Z80 assembly assemblers, such as SDCC.
Over the next seven years, the phrase had gained enough recognition that "Byte" magazine referred to its readers in its first edition as "[in] the "personal computing" field", and "Creative Computing" defined the personal computer as a "non-(time)shared system containing sufficient processing power and storage capabilities to satisfy the needs of an individual user." In 1977, three new pre-assembled small computers hit the markets which "Byte" would refer to as the "1977 Trinity" of personal computing. The Apple II and the PET 2001 were advertised as "personal computers", while the TRS-80 was described as a microcomputer used for household tasks including ""personal" financial management". By 1979, over half a million microcomputers were sold and the youth of the day had a new concept of the personal computer.
In the Commodore world, GEOS was available on the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128. Later, a version was available for PCs running DOS. It could be used with a mouse or a joystick as a pointing device, and came with a suite of GUI applications. Commodore's later product line, the Amiga platform, ran a GUI operating system by default. The Amiga laid the blueprint for future development of personal computers with its groundbreaking graphics and sound capabilities. "Byte" called it "the first multimedia computer... so far ahead of its time that almost nobody could fully articulate what it was all about."
In 1971, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded a small engineering company, Syzygy Engineering, that designed and built "Computer Space", the world's first commercially available arcade video game, for Nutting Associates. On June 27, 1972, the two incorporated Atari, Inc. and soon hired Al Alcorn as their first design engineer. Bushnell asked Alcorn to produce an arcade version of the Magnavox Odyssey's Tennis game, which would be named Pong. While Bushnell incorporated Atari in June 1972, Syzygy Company was never formally incorporated. Before Atari's incorporation, Bushnell considered various terms from the game Go, eventually choosing "atari", referencing a position in the game when a group of stones is imminently in danger of being taken by one's opponent. Atari was incorporated in the state of California on June 27, 1972.
In 1973, Atari secretly spawned a competitor called Kee Games, headed by Nolan's next door neighbor Joe Keenan, to circumvent pinball distributors' insistence on exclusive distribution deals; both Atari and Kee could market virtually the same game to different distributors, each getting an "exclusive" deal. Joe Keenan's management of the subsidiary led to him being promoted president of Atari that same year.
In 1971, the arcade game, "Computer Space was released." The following year, Atari, Inc. released the first commercially successful video game, "Pong", the original arcade version of which sold over 19,000 arcade cabinets. That same year saw the introduction of video games to the home market with the release of the early video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey. However, both the arcade and home markets would be dominated by "Pong" clones, which flooded the market and led to the video game crash of 1977. The crash eventually came to an end with the success of Taito's "Space Invaders", released in 1978, sparking a renaissance for the video game industry and paving the way for the golden age of video arcade games. The game's success inspired arcade machines to become prevalent in mainstream locations such as shopping malls, traditional storefronts, restaurants and convenience stores during the golden age. "Space Invaders" would go on to sell over 360,000 arcade cabinets worldwide, and by 1982, generate a revenue of $2 billion in quarters, equivalent to $4.6 billion in 2011.
In 1981, he wired together the backplanes of two DEC VAX-11/780's and made the first multi-CPU Unix computer, preceding DEC's dual processor VAX-11/782. The operating system was based on the 4.2 BSD kernel, and the modifications thus made eventually made it into the 4.3 BSD Unix release. At the beginning of the 4.3 BSD user manuals, Bill Joy wrote a special note of thanks to GHG for being courageous enough to put the multi-CPU kernel into a production environment before anyone else did. (However, the frequent crashes for a while inspired the writing of many humorous text files by the Purdue University Electrical Engineering student body, such as "The VAX had a Blowout", to be sung to the tune of London Bridge is Falling Down). The development of the Dual-CPU Unix system was the subject of Goble's Master's thesis.
Mary Allen Wilkes (born September 25, 1937 in Chicago, Illinois) is a former computer programmer and logic designer, most known for her work with the LINC computer, now recognized by many as the world's first "personal computer." Wilkes graduated from Wellesley College in 1959 where she majored in philosophy and theology. At that time she wanted to become a lawyer but was discouraged by friends and mentors because she was a woman. She sought work in the computer field partly because computer programming was a field that was open to women and partly because her geography teacher in the eighth grade had told her during a class discussion, "Mary Allen, when you grow up, you ought to be a computer programmer." She had no idea at the
time what that meant, but she never forgot it. She finally became an attorney in 1975.
Thermal transfer printing was invented by SATO corporation, a Japanese company. They produced the world's first thermal transfer label printer, SATO M-2311, in 1981.The concept of a single-chip microprocessor CPU (central processing unit) was conceived in a 1968 meeting in Japan between Sharp engineer Tadashi Sasaki and an unnamed female software engineering researcher from Nara Women's College. He discussed the concept at a brainstorming meeting that was held in Japan. Sasaki attributes the basic invention to break the chipset of a calculator into four parts with ROM (4001), RAM (4002), shift registers (4003) and CPU (4004) to an unnamed woman, a software engineering researcher from Nara Women's College, who was present at the meeting. Sasaki then had his first meeting with Noyce in 1968. Sasaki discussed the microprocessor concept with Busicom and Intel in 1968, and presented the woman's four-division chipset concept to Intel and Busicom. This provided the basis for the single-chip microprocessor design of the Intel 4004. He was also involved in the development of the Busicom 141-PF desktop calculator which led to the 4004's creation. Sasaki thus played a key role in the creation of the first microprocessor.
The TI-99/4 has a calculator-style chiclet keyboard and a character set that lacked lowercase text. The TI-99/4A added an additional graphics mode, "lowercase" characters consisting of small capitals, and a full-travel keyboard. Both use 16-bit processors, making the TI-99/4 series the first 16-bit home computers.
By 1982, an estimated 621,000 home computers were in American households, at an average sales price of US$530 (). After the success of the Radio Shack TRS-80, the Commodore PET and the Apple II in 1977, almost every manufacturer of consumer electronics rushed to introduce a home computer. Large numbers of new machines of all types began to appear during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Mattel, Coleco, Texas Instruments and Timex, none of which had any previous connection to the computer industry, all had short-lived home computer lines in the early 1980s. Some home computers were more successful – the BBC Micro, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Atari 800XL and Commodore 64, sold many units over several years and attracted third-party software development.
The TI-92 was originally released in 1995, and was the first symbolic calculator made by Texas Instruments. It came with a computer algebra system (CAS) based on Derive, and was one of the first calculators to offer 3D graphing. The TI-92 was not allowed on most standardized tests due mostly to its QWERTY keyboard. Its larger size was also rather cumbersome compared to other graphing calculators. In response to these concerns, Texas Instruments introduced the TI-89 which is functionally similar to the original TI-92, but featured Flash ROM and 188 KB RAM, and a smaller design without the QWERTY keyboard. The TI-92 was then replaced by the TI-92 Plus, which was essentially a TI-89 with the larger QWERTY keyboard design of the TI-92. Eventually, TI released the Voyage 200, which is a smaller, lighter version of the TI-92 Plus with more Flash ROM.
The TI-92 is no longer sold through TI or its dealers, and is very hard to come by in stores.
The Texas Instruments Professional Computer (TIPC) and the Texas Instruments Portable Professional Computer (TIPPC) were devices that were both released on January 31, 1983; the TIPC was a desktop PC and the TIPPC was a fully compatible, portable version of the TIPC. Both computers were most often used by white-collar information workers and professionals that needed to gather, manipulate and transmit information. TI was the first company to release videotape training videos for their computers.