[8] Texas Instruments emerged in 1951 after a reorganization of Geophysical Service Incorporated, a company founded in 1930 that manufactured equipment for use in the seismic industry, as well as defense electronics.

[13] In the stock market, Texas Instruments is often regarded as an indicator for the semiconductor and electronics industry as a whole, since the company sells to more than 100,000 customers.

In November 1945, Patrick Haggerty was hired as general manager of the Laboratory and Manufacturing (L&M) division, which focused on electronic equipment.

Texas Instruments exists to create, make, and market useful products and services to satisfy the needs of its customers throughout the world.

In early 1952, Texas Instruments purchased a patent license to produce germanium transistors from Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of AT&T, for US$25,000, beginning production by the end of the year.

Haggerty brought Gordon Teal to the company due to his expertise in growing semiconductor crystals while at Bell Telephone Laboratories.

Adcock, who like Teal was a physical chemist, began leading a small research group focused on the task of fabricating grown-junction, silicon, single-crystal, small-signal transistors.

[23] This work was reported in the spring of 1954, at the IRE off-the-record conference on solid-state devices, and was later published in the Journal of Applied Physics.

On May 10, 1954, at the Institute of Radio Engineers National Conference on Airborne Electronics in Dayton, Ohio, Teal presented a paper: "Some Recent Developments in Silicon and Germanium Materials and Devices".

This was overturned on June 19, 1996, in favor of TI[34] (note: Intel is usually given credit with Texas Instruments for the almost-simultaneous invention of the microprocessor).

This resulted in the development the TMC0280 one-chip linear predictive coding speech synthesizer, which was the first time a single silicon chip had electronically replicated the human voice.

[36][37] This was used in several TI commercial products beginning with Speak & Spell, which was introduced at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in June 1978.

[39] In the 1960s, company president Pat Haggerty had a team that included Jack Kilby to work on a handheld calculator project.

Kilby and two other colleagues created the Cal-Tech, a three-pound battery-powered calculator that could do basic math and fit six-digit numbers on its display.

The optical design of the SR-50 is somewhat similar to the HP-35 edited by Hewlett-Packard before in early 1972, but buttons for the operations "+", "–", ... are in the right of the number block and the decimal point lies between two neighboring digits.

LEDs were replaced with LCD watches for a short time, but these could not compete because of styling issues, excessive makes and models, and price points.

The company for years successfully made and sold PC-compatible laptops before withdrawing from the market and selling its product line to Acer in 1998.

[43] TI entered the defense electronics market in 1942 with submarine detection equipment,[44] based on the seismic exploration technology previously developed for the oil industry.

During the early 1980s, TI instituted a quality program which included Juran training, as well as promoting statistical process control, Taguchi methods, and Design for Six Sigma.

In 1992, the DSEG division[46] of Texas Instruments' quality-improvement efforts were rewarded by winning the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for manufacturing.

TI developed the AAA-4 infrared search and track device in the late 1950s and early 1960s for the F-4B Phantom[47] for passive scanning of jet-engine emissions, but it possessed limited capabilities and was eliminated on F-4Ds and later models.

[53] In 1964, TI began development of the first laser guidance system for precision-guided munitions, leading to the Paveway series of laser-guided bombs (LGBs).

In 1986, TI won the Army FGM-148 Javelin fire-and-forget man portable antitank guided missile in a joint venture with Martin Marietta.

[58] The Department of Justice required that Raytheon divest the TI Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit (MMIC) operations after closing the transaction.

[63] TI was a major original-equipment manufacturer of sensor, control, protection, and RFID products for the automotive, appliance, aircraft, and other industries.

[16] TI's remaining businesses consisting of DLP products (primarily used in projectors to create high-definition images), calculators and certain custom semiconductors known as application-specific integrated circuits.

Throughout the 1980s, Texas Instruments worked closely with National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) to develop a calculator to become the educational standard.

One of the common unifying forces that has united the community over the years has been the rather contentious relationship with TI regarding control over its graphing calculators.

[citation needed] TI graphing calculators generally fall into two distinct groups—the older ones powered by the Zilog Z80 and the newer ones running on the Motorola 68000 series.

TI responded by sending invalid DMCA takedown notices, causing the Texas Instruments signing key controversy.