Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments had been introduced as Geophysical Services Inc in 1930, and had delivered worlds first Silicon transistor in January 1954, and patented Jack Kirby's worlds first integrated circuit design in September of 1958. Jack Kirby's design used Germanium as the semi-conductive wafer, while six months later, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor (and later co-founder of Intel) developed the worlds first integrated circuit which used Silicon.

The original cheap pocket calculator was available by 1976 thanks to the TI-30 and its LED display, and after undercutting Commodore in this line for a number of years, they introduced the Texas Instruments Speak and Spell in 1978, which used a TMC oh-two-eighty speech synthesiser.

In 1979 TI hoped that by combining this technology with the 9900 CPU, they could fill the gap between the second generation consoles, and the emerging home computer market. Unfortunately, TI 99/4 production problems delay the release until November, and despite re-releasing the machine in 1981, and spending 1 million on an ad campaign with Bill Cosby, they never sold more than a thousand units a month, forcing the 5th largest semiconductor company in the world to drop its line of home computers by March 1984