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Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments, USA.

Texas Instruments started to investigate the design of a hand-held calculator in 1966 with the "Caltech" project.  After a commercial tie up with Canon the result was one of the first hand-held calculators, the Canon Pocketronic of 1971.  Texas Instruments was awarded U.S. and Japanese patents for a "Miniature Electronic Calculator".
At first Texas Instruments was only interested in manufacturing the integrated circuits, but started test-marketing its first complete calculator, the TI 2500 'Datamath' in 1972.  This was a great success and shortly after it was announced that TI "expects to announce a new calculator every 60 to 90 days for the next several months."[1]  These were the first of a long line of Texas instrument calculators, which continues to this day.

 

Examples of Texas Instruments calculators

Canon Pocketronic

Canon Pocketronic

Texas Instruments was a pioneer in the integrated circuits for calculators and supplied a chip set for the Canon Pocketronic, one of the first hand-held calculators.

The three integrated circuits can be seen in the photograph below.

This is a featured calculator.

Canon Pocketronic inside
TI 2500 “Datamath”

Texas Instruments TI 2500 "Datamath".

Introduced in mid-1972 this was the first commercial calculator produced by Texas Instruments, and cost $149.99.

This is a featured calculator.

Texas Instruments TI-30

Texas Instruments TI-30.

Introduced in 1977, this model was very popular and a great number were sold, making it very common.

This is a featured calculator.

Texas Instruments TI-58
Texas Instruments TI-58

Texas Instruments TI-58.

Programmable calculator introduced in 1977, features semiconductor library modules for different applications.  By using specially developed modules several very specialised calculators were produced based on this model.

This is a featured calculator.

 

For further photographs of Texas Instruments hand-held calculators see the Calculator Photo Library on this site.

On this site see also the articles:

Joerg Woerner has a site with lots of information and photographs about Texas Instruments calculators at www.datamath.org

 

Reference:

  1. "Business, science calculators next for TI", Electronics, September 25th, 1972, p28.

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Text & photographs copyright, except where stated otherwise, © Nigel Tout 2000-2024.