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Query: When was Texas Instruments founded?
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.
Headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, the company has approximately $7 billion of annual revenue. It is the largest private-sector employer in Brevard County, Florida (approximately 6,000). The company was the parent of Intersil (Harris Semiconductor). Most of the wireless start-ups in South Brevard County were founded and are staffed by former Harris Corporation engineers and technicians. The company's Digital Telephone Systems (DTS) division was sold to Teltronics.
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.
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.
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.
Microstrip, a type of transmission line usable at microwave frequencies, was invented with printed circuits in the 1950s. The ability to cheaply fabricate a wide range of shapes on printed circuit boards allowed microstrip versions of capacitors, inductors, resonant stubs, splitters, directional couplers, diplexers, filters and antennas to be made, thus allowing compact microwave circuits to be constructed. 
Transistors that operated at microwave frequencies were developed in the 1970s. The semiconductor gallium arsenide (GaAs) has a much higher electron mobility than silicon, so devices fabricated with this material can operate at 4 times the frequency of similar devices of silicon. Beginning in the 1970s GaAs was used to make the first microwave transistors, and it has dominated microwave semiconductors ever since. MESFETs (metal-semiconductor field-effect transistors), fast GaAs field effect transistors using Schottky junctions for the gate, were developed starting in 1968 and have reached cutoff frequencies of 100 GHz, and are now the most widely used active microwave devices. Another family of transistors with a higher frequency limit is the HEMT (high electron mobility transistor), a field effect transistor made with two different semiconductors, AlGaAs and GaAs, using heterojunction technology, and the similar HBT (heterojunction bipolar transistor).
The TI-84 Plus Silver Edition was released in 2004 as an upgrade to the TI-83 Plus. Like the TI-83 Plus Silver Edition, it features a 15 MHz Zilog Z80 processor and 24 kB user available RAM. The chip has 128 kB, but TI has not made an OS that uses all of it. Newer calculators have a RAM chip that is only 48 kB. All calculators with the letter H or later as the last letter in the serial code have fewer ram pages, causing some programs to not run correctly. There is 1.5 MB of user-accessible Flash ROM. Like the standard TI-84 Plus, the Silver Edition includes a built-in USB port, a built-in clock, and assembly support. It uses 4 AAA batteries and a backup button cell battery. The TI-84 Plus Silver Edition comes preloaded with a variety of applications. These programs are also available for the TI-84 Plus, but some must be downloaded separately from TI's website. It is manufactured by Kinpo Electronics.
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.
Other high-tech companies with operations in Austin include 3M, Apple, Amazon, AMD, Apartment Ratings, Applied Materials, ARM Holdings, Bigcommerce, BioWare, Blizzard Entertainment, Buffalo Technology, Cirrus Logic, Cisco Systems, Dropbox, eBay, PayPal, Electronic Arts, Flextronics, Facebook, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Hoover's, HomeAway, Hostgator, Intel Corporation, National Instruments, Nvidia, Oracle, Polycom, Qualcomm, Inc., Rackspace, RetailMeNot, Rooster Teeth, Samsung Group, Silicon Laboratories, Spansion, United Devices, and Xerox. In 2010, Facebook accepted a grant to build a downtown office that could bring as many as 200 jobs to the city. The proliferation of technology companies has led to the region's nickname, "Silicon Hills", and spurred development that greatly expanded the city.
The TI-84 Plus series was introduced in April 2004 as a further update to the TI-83 Plus line. Despite the new appearance, there are very few actual changes. The main improvements of the TI-84 Plus and TI-84 Plus Silver Edition are a modernized case design, changeable faceplates (Silver Edition only), a few new functions, more speed and memory, a clock, and USB port connectivity. The TI-84 Plus also has a brighter screen with a clearer contrast, though this caused a bug with the LCD driver in some calculators sold. The TI-84 Plus has 3 times the memory of the TI-83 Plus, and the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition has 9 times the memory of the TI-83 Plus. They both have 2.5 times the speed of the TI-83 Plus. The operating system and math functionality remain essentially the same, as does the standard link port for connecting with the rest of the TI calculator series.
Fairchild's strategy for competing in the transistor market was to be fast and flexible. Rather than tying their research and development to lengthy 1-3 year military contracts, they financed development through Fairchild Camera. This enabled them to focus on promising ideas and develop them quickly. IBM was interested in obtaining transistors for a navigation computer for the B-70 bomber. Fairchild contracted to provide transistors to meet the specifications for IBM's core-memory driver. They developed complementary NPN and PNP transistors which could be used as a matched pair in a variety of circuit applications. Gordon Moore and David Allison worked on the NPN transistor, while Jean Hoerni developed the PNP transistor using boron diffusion. Scaling up to production of components in quantity presented major technological challenges, and Moore's NPN transistor was ready for production before Hoerni's PNP transistor. By August 1958, within 8 months of the company's creation, Fairchild was delivering Mesa transistors to IBM. Once it became available, the mesa transistor was desired for a wide variety of military applications. The speed with which it had been developed gave Fairchild a virtual monopoly on the fast-growing market for the next year. The most significant contract came from Autonetics, which was developing the navigation and control computer for the Minuteman ICBM.
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.
Silicon Hills is a nickname for the cluster of high-tech companies in the Austin metropolitan area in the U.S. state of Texas. The name is analogous to Silicon Valley, but refers to the hilly terrain on the west side of Austin. High tech industries in the area include enterprise software, semiconductors, corporate R&D, biotechnology, gaming, and a variety of startup companies.
A tunnel diode or Esaki diode is a type of semiconductor diode that has negative resistance due to the quantum mechanical effect called tunneling. It was invented in August 1957 by Leo Esaki, Yuriko Kurose, and Takashi Suzuki when they were working at Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, now known as Sony. In 1973, Esaki received the Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Brian Josephson, for discovering the electron tunneling effect used in these diodes. Robert Noyce independently devised the idea of a tunnel diode while working for William Shockley, but was discouraged from pursuing it. Tunnel diodes were first manufactured by Sony in 1957, followed by General Electric and other companies from about 1960, and are still made in low volume today.
The first widely used solid-state negative resistance device was the tunnel diode, invented in 1957 by Japanese physicist Leo Esaki. Because they have lower parasitic capacitance than vacuum tubes due to their small junction size, diodes can function at higher frequencies, and tunnel diode oscillators proved able to produce power at microwave frequencies, above the range of ordinary vacuum tube oscillators. Its invention set off a search for other negative resistance semiconductor devices for use as microwave oscillators, resulting in the discovery of the IMPATT diode, Gunn diode, TRAPATT diode, and others. In 1969 Kurokawa derived conditions for stability in negative resistance circuits. Currently negative differential resistance diode oscillators are the most widely used sources of microwave energy, and many new negative resistance devices have been discovered in recent decades.
Ahmed H. Tewfik is an Egyptian-American electrical engineer, professor and college administrator who currently serves as the chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin since October 1, 2010. He holds the Cockrell Family Chair in Engineering #1 at UT Austin. For his research and contributions to the field of Signal Processing he was awarded the 2017 IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award as well as the IEEE Third Millennium Award in 2000. He is the 2018–2019 IEEE Signal Processing Society President-Elect.
The Texas Transportation Company (TXTC) was a class III short-line railroad in San Antonio that serviced the Pearl Brewery. The company operated electric locomotives on their line for more than 113 years. TXTC was started as a private company in 1887 until it was chartered on September 24, 1897. In the early days when the Lone Star Brewing Company was located on W. Jones Avenue, TXTC serviced both breweries. Service ended for the line when the Pearl Brewery closed in 2001.
From November 17, 1947, to December 23, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at AT&T's Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey of the United States performed experiments and observed that when two gold point contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, a signal was produced with the output power greater than the input. Solid State Physics Group leader William Shockley saw the potential in this, and over the next few months worked to greatly expand the knowledge of semiconductors. The term "transistor" was coined by John R. Pierce as a contraction of the term "transresistance". According to Lillian Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch, authors of a biography of John Bardeen, Shockley had proposed that Bell Labs' first patent for a transistor should be based on the field-effect and that he be named as the inventor. Having unearthed Lilienfeld’s patents that went into obscurity years earlier, lawyers at Bell Labs advised against Shockley's proposal because the idea of a field-effect transistor that used an electric field as a "grid" was not new. Instead, what Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley invented in 1947 was the first point-contact transistor. In acknowledgement of this accomplishment, Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect".
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.)
A transistor radio is a small portable radio receiver that uses transistor-based circuitry. Following their development in 1954, made possible by the invention of the transistor in 1947, they became the most popular electronic communication device in history, with billions manufactured during the 1960s and 1970s. Their pocket size sparked a change in popular music listening habits, allowing people to listen to music anywhere they went. Beginning in the 1980s, however, cheap AM transistor radios were superseded by devices with higher audio quality such as portable CD players, personal audio players, boomboxes, and (eventually) smartphones, some of which contain radios themselves.
The TI-83 series is a series of graphing calculators manufactured by Texas Instruments.
The original TI-83 is itself an upgraded version of the TI-82. Released in 1996, it was one of the most popular graphing calculators for students. In addition to the functions present on normal scientific calculators, the TI-83 includes many features, including function graphing, polar/parametric/sequence graphing modes, statistics, trigonometric, and algebraic functions, along with many useful applications. Although it does not include as many calculus functions, applications (for the TI-83 Plus—see below) and programs can be downloaded from certain websites, or written on the calculator.
During the early 1980s, Texas Instruments instituted a quality program which included Juran training, as well as promoting statistical process control, Taguchi methods and Design for Six Sigma. In the late '80s, the company, along with Eastman Kodak and Allied Signal, began involvement with Motorola institutionalizing Motorola's Six Sigma methodology. Motorola, who originally developed the Six Sigma methodology, began this work in 1982. In 1992, the DSEG division of Texas Instruments' quality improvement efforts were rewarded by winning the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for manufacturing.TI developed the AAA-4 infra-red search and track (IRST) in the late 50's and early 60's for the F-4B Phantom for passive scanning of jet engine emissions but possessed limited capabilities and was eliminated on F-4D's and later models.
Texas Instruments invented the hand-held calculator (a prototype called "Cal Tech") in 1967 and the single-chip microcomputer in 1971, was assigned the first patent on a single-chip microprocessor (invented by Gary Boone) on September 4, 1973. This was disputed by Gilbert Hyatt, formerly of the Micro Computer Company, in August 1990 when he was awarded a patent superseding TI's. This was over-turned on June 19, 1996 in favor of TI (note: Intel is usually given credit with Texas Instruments for the almost-simultaneous invention of the microprocessor).
In the early 1970s, James Truchard, Jeff Kodosky, and Bill Nowlin, were working at the University of Texas at Austin Applied Research Laboratories. As part of a project conducting research for the U.S. Navy, the men were using early computer technology to collect and analyze data. Frustrated with the inefficient data collection methods they were using, the three decided to create a product that would enable their task to be done more easily. In 1976, working in the garage at Truchard's home, the three founded a new company. They attempted to incorporate under several names, including Longhorn Instruments and Texas Digital, but all were rejected. Finally, they settled on the current name of National Instruments.
MTL Instruments was founded as a private company in 1971. In 2005 the company acquired GeCma Components GmbH, which manufactures computer terminals for use in hazardous areas. In 2007 MTL acquired three companies: ELPRO Technologies, which specialises in industrial wireless equipment and radio telemetry; RTK Instruments, which manufactures alarm equipment for process control systems; and Ocean Technical Systems, which provides remote instrumentation for offshore drilling vessels, tankers and pipelines. In 2008, MTL Instruments was purchased by Cooper Industries of Houston, Texas, under that company's Crouse-Hinds division.