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A Craving for Calculation
In 1965, Patrick Haggerty, president of Texas Instruments (TI), wanted to make a new bet on the future of electronics. In that future, he believed, in a theme he frequently expounded, the use of el…
The pocket calculator posed a few other engineering challenges, most notably how to display numbers while running off of a small battery, but none of them mattered without access to chips that could pack hundreds or thousands of circuit components (and the wires to connect them) into a tiny area. As late as 1965, when Moore wrote his famous paper, integrated circuits remained an expensive, niche technology used mainly in aerospace systems for the military and NASA, where reliability and reducing size and weight were all-important. At first, American office equipment makers like SCM (Smith-Corona Marchant), Friden (a division of Singer, once famous for its sewing machines), and Burroughs dominated the market, but new competitors appeared later in the decade, especially from Japan, just as microchips reached the crossover point where they became economical for mass-market applications.
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