Texas Instruments: The Dallas Oil Company That Went From Finding Oil to Building the Microchip

Texas Instruments started as an oil exploration company. Then it helped turn the silicon transistor into a practical technology, played a central role in the development of the integrated circuit, and put electronic calculators and speech synthesis into everyday life. But its biggest gamble came with the TI-99/4A. A brutal price war with Commodore pushed the computer business into massive losses, forcing TI to walk away. This is the story of how Texas Instruments went from searching for oil beneath the ground to building technology that changed what was possible inside our hands. Subscribe to Tech Relics for more stories about the companies behind the technology we grew up with.