TI-84: Monopoly math

Version History

The episode explores the history and market dominance of Texas Instruments' graphing calculators, tracing their evolution from semiconductor

Key takeaways

• Texas Instruments used the development of the integrated circuit to transition from military/industrial components to consumer handhelds.
• TI established market dominance by standardizing an interface that became the basis for school textbooks and lesson plans.

Main topics

• History of Texas Instruments
• Semiconductor and Integrated Circuit Innovation

Notable quotes

Calculators are computers.

Conclusion

The episode concludes that while TI's calculators may not be the most

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Technology moves really fast. Everything is always getting faster. Everything is always getting cheaper. Everybody is constantly having new ideas about everything. And then there's graphing calculators. When it comes to graphing calculators, there was one company 50 years ago that figured out how to get you and me to buy their calculators and made sure no one else could ever get in. Speaker 8 (0:21) From The Verge and Vox Media, this is Version History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pierce, and on today's show, we're talking about TI Graphic Calculators. Speaker 6 (0:44) Support for the show comes from Square. If your business relies on a bunch of disconnected tools to get things done, then it's time to check out Square. You can simplify your operations and bring payments, inventory, staff, scheduling, and online orders into one intuitive system. If you're starting a business or running one that deserves better tools, Square helps you sell, manage, and grow without slowing down. Right now, you can get up to $200 off Square hardware. at square.com slash go slash version history. That's square.com slash go slash version history. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. Speaker 2 (1:27) It's time to talk. Calculators, a thing I never thought I would say ever again in my entire life. Joining me in studio, Nilay Patel. Hello. Hello, sir. What was your calculator? High school Nilay. What's Speaker 1 (1:41) he Speaker 2 (1:41) using? So I'm old. So Speaker 7 (1:42) I had a TI-82. Speaker 3 (1:44) This Speaker 1 (1:44) is pre-USB port. It's pre the redesign that you see here. That thing was a square brick. You got the one right before it became really interesting, actually, which is Speaker 8 (1:55) sort of fun. We're going to talk about all of this. Also here, V-Song. Hi, V. Speaker 3 (1:58) Hi. What was Speaker 8 (1:59) yours? Speaker 3 (1:59) I had a TI-83 Plus Silver Edition. I was special. That's Speaker 8 (2:04) fancy. Speaker 3 (2:04) It was fancy. Speaker 2 (2:05) You were describing before we started recording your weird high school Speaker 3 (2:09) calculator Speaker 8 (2:10) situation. So Speaker 3 (2:12) I went to Dork Central for high school, Stuyvesant High School in New York City, which is a math and science school, because the wealth disparity at Stuyvesant when I went was extremely huge. So you had kids on food stamps and you had kids who were billionaires. very well connected in New York, whatever. But, you know, these calculators are expensive. So we had a used TI-83 market. And then when the TI-84 came out, I was still in high school. There was a schism between the kids who could afford the new TI-84s despite having the TI-83s and then just a whole drama. And if you had the silver edition like I did, you felt special just because it was translucent. Speaker 2 (2:52) Does this sound familiar to you, Eli? The like status symbol of the calculator. This was definitely a thing in my high school and more of a thing in general than I realized. Was this a thing in your world? Speaker 1 (3:02) So again. Speaker 2 (3:03) You're Speaker 1 (3:03) old. Yeah, understood. Speaker 7 (3:05) We took our TI-82s apart and painted them. Oh. See, Speaker 3 (3:08) that's fun. Speaker 7 (3:09) I like that. The TI-82s were big and square. They didn't have this design. They were just square. And so it was four screws, six screws, and you would just lift off the back and you could just paint it. What color was yours? Mine was silver with a black stripe. There was lots of stripes. There was lots of spray paint and stripes. Nice. And then the other thing, which was very important, was the cover slid off. And so you could do almost anything you wanted to that cover. And what we discovered that you could do with that cover is you could slide a Game Boy Pocket right into it. Oh. Speaker 2 (3:42) And that's the Speaker 7 (3:42) little silver Game Boy when they made him small. It was still black and white, but it fit perfectly in that cover. And the main thing that you had to do. was you had to mod the Game Boy so that it didn't ding when it turned on. Speaker 8 (3:55) And then you just put it in the thing, hold it up like you're using a calculator. And then you're just Speaker 7 (3:59) graphing. That's pretty great. You're just graphing on Speaker 3 (4:02) that Speaker 7 (4:02) Game Boy. We got caught a lot. I Speaker 3 (4:04) like how most of our memories with the calculator are just all the ways we've modded the calculator to do non-calculator things. Speaker 8 (4:13) This turns out to be a theme of this entire story going all the way back and kind of all the way forward. So let me go back. And there's a thing we have to do here, which is I have to tell you a brief history of the calculator. It's going to be very brief. But the main thing I want you to take away from the beginning of this story and, frankly, this entire episode is calculators are computers. And in so many ways, before the personal computer industry as we know it now, before kind of the mid-'70s, Intel and Apple and all these companies building the personal computer, building Silicon Valley as we know it, Right before that was calculators. And calculators were that thing. Like the launch of a new calculator was like the launch of the iPhone 4. It was like a big deal. It got headlines. There was a chip for calculators that was on the cover of Fortune magazine at one point. This is like this is a huge culturally important phenomenon. So back to the early 60s. In the United States. The semiconductor industry is starting to boom. You have this company, Texas Instruments, which I think is like, we don't talk about TI all that much in sort of current technology stories. But it turns out to be one of the most kind of historically important companies in tech, I think. It was early to transistors. It made transistor radios. It made chips for speech synthesis, like decades before that was a thing. TI created the speak and spell is a fun fact I recently discovered. They've been basically way ahead of chips for a really long time. And this big thing that happened in the early 60s was this thing called the integrated circuit. I do not pretend to be a chip expert, but Neil, correct me if I'm wrong. The integrated circuit is basically like we took a bunch of computing things and shoved them all together onto one chip, which makes it cheaper and easier and smaller. And this is like the beginning of microchips. Yeah. Speaker 7 (5:59) Right. And TI is, again, very fascinating because it's one of those companies where the people who work there went on to start all the other most important companies in the world. And all of those little pieces, we invented one thing. We invented the integrated circuit, the IC, is like a direct line to six other companies that happened because of this core innovation. But in the history of computing, there are these core technical innovations that lead to entire eras of computing. And I would say in that. That time period, this is, oh, we can make dozens of new kinds of products. Speaker 8 (6:31) Yes. And they sort of understood this. But at the time, most of the money for TI and for the semiconductor industry was like big military uses. Like they were making these giant computers to put into Air Force bombers. And this was when the space race was really booming. And so there was a lot of that stuff happening. But there was, like you said, the sense that, oh, we've done something new and big and remarkable and we have to find places to put it. And they decide to get into calculators in a big new way. But first, let me just give you a sense of what calculators looked like in the early 1960s. This is like an important thing. So this right here is one of the most important calculators of the 1960s. That Speaker 3 (7:13) looks like a typewriter. Speaker 8 (7:14) Yeah. V, can you just describe what this thing looks like for people who can't see it? Speaker 3 (7:17) It looks like if you stretched out a typewriter, basically. It's like a giant box with a – a bunch of little keys on it. And that really looks like that typewriter thing at the top where, you know, it goes, and then you push it back. That looks, that's what that looks like. Speaker 2 (7:35) Big ass typewriter. Old school cash register is kind of the vibe I get from this too. It's Speaker 1 (7:40) a Speaker 2 (7:40) giant, giant machine. And it's very mechanical. It's very complicated. These things broke a lot. They weighed a million pounds. Speaker 8 (7:50) They were just, this was what a calculator. was for the longest time. Calculators were also very important, right? This was like an increasingly crucial tool in businesses. Everybody wanted a calculator, and that's Speaker 2 (8:02) what Speaker 8 (8:02) they all looked like. So TI decides in the mid-1960s that actually what they need in order to convince people to do stuff with integrated circuits, they need a consumer product. that people will use. They had invented the transistors. And so they invented the transistor radio to be like, look, here's what you can do with this new technology. And it worked. It was huge. So there's this great story about this guy, Jack Kilby, who's an engineer who helped create the integrated circuit, sitting on a plane with the boss of TI. And they're just like brainstorming. And they're like, what if we made a handheld calculator? And they just did that. And that was, they just happened to be sitting next to each other on a plane. And this is what happens. So this tiny group of engineers goes off to create a handheld calculator. This is their big idea. We're going to use an integrated circuit to make a handheld calculator. They codenamed it Caltech, which is delightful on two levels. All of TI's codenames were academic institutions. So they had like a Project MIT. This was Project Caltech, which also turns out to be really good because it's calculator technology. I'm told this was not intentional. Speaker 1 (9:07) But it worked on two levels. It's very good. How do you make that not intentional? How do you say the words Caltech out loud and be like, you know what? It's not that thing. No one heard Cal and went, oh, calculator. Yeah. It's Speaker 2 (9:18) a Speaker 1 (9:18) fair point. Speaker 8 (9:19) So they start building this thing and they wind up making a prototype of a calculator. This is in 1967. They called it Caltech. Let me just show you a picture of it. So right next to the one we just saw, right? Big, huge cash register typewriter thing. This is the prototype they make. That looks familiar. V, will you describe this one? Speaker 3 (9:37) Very familiar. It's a smaller rectangle with a numpad on it, four functions, and a little window where you can read the numbers and, oh my God, the logo of Texas Instruments. That's like seared into my brain right next to the window. How Speaker 7 (9:56) big is this thing? Speaker 2 (9:56) It weighed about three pounds. Oh my God. It's still pretty big. Most of the weight was batteries. Speaker 8 (10:02) You could plug it into the wall to charge it, but also it had batteries. This was like a big new thing that you could theoretically pick it up. They Speaker 2 (10:10) called it a pocket calculator. I think that's largely a lie. I think it's like seven inches tall. It's a pretty big thing. That's a big pocket. That's Speaker 3 (10:17) not a woman's pocket. I'll tell you that much. A Speaker 2 (10:20) couple of important things to notice about this. Speaker 8 (10:22) It has 10 numbers, right? Zero to nine. The one we saw before had... multiple nines and multiple eights and multiple sevens. Like it was very complicated to put these things together. They figured out to do this much more simply. It could only do the four basics, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. And the thing you're seeing at the top there that looks sort of like a screen is not in fact a screen. It's a thermal printer. Speaker 1 (10:47) Oh, Speaker 8 (10:47) this was that coming, that tape coming out of the left. That's right. Yep. And so. One of the things that was happening at the time is there was this early new technology called LCD that was very expensive. So they were like, well, that doesn't work. We don't want to put it in here. And the other way to do a display at this time was to, I don't completely understand how this works, but it was basically like neon tube lights. Yeah, yeah. So that was also too expensive and used too much power. So they were like, okay, our only option, this is one of the last things they figured out, was how do we display the numbers, was to have thermal tape so it would actually. burn dot matrix numbers in as you went. That was their big idea. So they make this thing. It's just designed to be a prototype. This is the Caltech. It could only accept six digit numbers, which I really like. It was a very basic thing, but it completely blew everybody's mind because this is a handheld calculator. I should say there's an important thing that all of the calculator fans, nerds, whatever you want to call them, will care about. There is this. Huge fight going on at this time between Japanese companies and American companies. So you have at this moment Japanese product design and design in particular way ahead of the U.S. in terms of like ability to design cool functional electronics. Japan is way ahead. The U.S. is way ahead in semiconductors. So what you have over and over is Japanese product companies partnering with. American semiconductor manufacturers to make cool things. A bunch of those companies will come up over and over in this story. One of them is Casio, who is a sort of delightful side story in calculators forever and ever, and they will come up many times. But right now, the one that they find is this company, Canon. Canon, you may know, is primarily a camera company. Fun fact about Canon, Canon got into making calculators because they needed to do such complicated stuff to make their cameras better. They needed really complicated optical equations and discovered, oh, we sort of accidentally have the ability to make cool calculators. So they got into calculators. So Canon sees the Caltech, says this is cool. We also want to make one. And they make this. This is called the Pocketronic, which absolutely rules as a name for Speaker 3 (12:59) a calculator. Speaker 8 (12:59) It's better looking Speaker 3 (13:00) by a lot. Speaker 7 (13:02) Yeah. You see what David's saying. The Japanese companies are like, what if we tried hard? Yes. What if we Speaker 3 (13:07) made buttons different colors? Right. This is a much Speaker 2 (13:09) more like sane calculator design. It also has a giant spool of tape at the top. You can see there. From what I understand, each spool in the Pocketronic was 250 feet of tape, which sounds like a lot of tape. Speaker 8 (13:22) Apparently, it's not that much. The idea, like, I believe the battery on this thing lasted, like, three hours. And in those three hours of use, you could do thousands of equations on the processor, and that would use pretty much all of the tape. So this is, like, this is a thing that does a lot of work for you. But anyway, so this is the Pocketronic. It's a delightful little device. And that is the first one of these to actually come to market. But even this, when it comes out. is kind of not that exciting because this market starts to move really fast. Like I want you to think about the calculator market as the early computer market, right? Where every 15 minutes somebody has a new idea. So already at this point, there are other things with better displays. There are newer ideas. There are things that are starting to be smaller. This is called the Sinclair Executive. Oh my. That looks like a tiny remote. This came out around the same time. That's for me. The idea of the Sinclair Executive was that it was, I believe it was nine millimeters thick and you could put it in your breast pocket and that made you a badass. It was just a black rectangle. It Speaker 2 (14:27) looks like a prototype TV remote in a way that makes me really happy. Speaker 3 (14:31) Or like a really old, like one of those old bar cell phones circa 2000. Speaker 8 (14:37) So anyway, so this is coming out around the same time, right? So you can see the ideas happening. There's a version that is technically more advanced, but also. ones that are cooler looking, ones that are thinner. There's just a lot of stuff happening all at once. So your Speaker 7 (14:51) point about this being the early computer industry, I mean, this is very familiar, right? There's a core technology. We're going to have multi-touch screens now. What should phones look like? And there's just an explosion of form factors and styles. Some of them have buttons and some of them are really thin. What should AI hardware look like? Nonsense, I think, is the general answer right now, but we're going to figure it out. They had an IC that could do a calculator, and everybody had to rush to figure out what a calculator looked like. Speaker 2 (15:21) Exactly. And it was the idea of the integrated circuit, and Speaker 8 (15:24) all of a sudden, as soon as anybody saw anything about a calculator you could hold in your hand and put in your pocket, instantly understood it. In the same way that a lot of people took a look at a smartphone and went, oh, yeah, that, I get it. There is something to that moment. So then, again, all of this is happening in the course of a couple of years. And then we're going to fast forward, I promise. This doesn't take forever. This is just a delightful thing to have learned about. In 1972, TI, which had until then been a manufacturer, it was working with lots of companies. It took off really fast because it wasn't trying to be vertically integrated. It was the one who sold these chips to everybody. And so that actually worked really well. Everybody else had these exclusive manufacturing deals with each other. And TI was just like, we have chips. Do you want them? And so it grew really fast. But then in 1972, TI decides it wants to start selling its own calculator. So this is five years after the Caltech prototype. They've been working on these things, and they make this thing called the data math. Speaker 3 (16:22) Oh, my. V, Speaker 8 (16:24) describe it. What do you think? Speaker 3 (16:25) Well, if you think of, like, 80s and 90s computer beige, it's that color. Yep. And it sort of looks like a chunkier version of the calculator app on your iPhone. It kind of Speaker 5 (16:37) does. Just in Speaker 3 (16:37) terms of colors? Yeah. It's got like the beige function buttons, orange equal button, and then like white numbers. That's true. I Speaker 1 (16:48) had never thought about that. Speaker 3 (16:48) Doesn't it look like the calculator app? It Speaker 7 (16:49) really does. This is a very 70s design. This would look totally in context. It would fit totally in with all the aesthetics of 2001 A Space Odyssey. Speaker 1 (16:59) Yes. Right? Speaker 7 (17:00) And like Speaker 1 (17:01) stick it next to an Apple II and Speaker 2 (17:02) it would suddenly make, it would feel right at home. So this becomes TI's first calculator. It's a huge hit. And immediately, like almost immediately, TI just takes off. It becomes Speaker 8 (17:14) the biggest calculator manufacturer in the United States in three years. It Speaker 7 (17:19) is worth saying that was the prettiest one. Speaker 8 (17:21) Yes, it was. By far the prettiest Speaker 7 (17:23) one we've seen so Speaker 8 (17:24) far. It really was. And almost immediately, TI starts to do two very important things. One, it gets a patent on the idea of a miniature electronic calculator. Sure. They literally patented the Caltech. Like that first image I showed you is essentially in the patent. Here's what the patent looks like. That just is the calculator that they made. Right? That's the Caltech calculator. The Speaker 3 (17:46) thickness. Speaker 8 (17:47) Right. You can see how large it is. But the idea of – there are a bunch of things that are fairly specific about it that – make it easy to get around this patent over time. But for a while, the idea of a pretty small calculator kind of belongs to TI as of 1972, which turns out to be fairly important for a while. So TI gets this patent, but it also like pretty quickly starts to do a lot of work to get its calculators out there. They start to work with people who are, you know, using calculators in businesses. They start to... do a lot of work to train people to use their calculators. Like TI has this clear idea that we need to do a lot of work to push our version of the calculator into the world. A fun thing that I learned is when they first put the thing out, nobody knew what TI was. So everybody was like, what is this TI calculator? And so their line was, the company that makes your calculator chips now makes your calculator, which is like a rad tagline to have. That's pretty good. Yeah. So this works. It takes off. By 1975, it is winning the calculator market. But do you know what else is happening in 1975? It's computers. So this is where we take a big turn in the story. And this is why I've spent so much time building up to this. Computers start to take over. And until this point, calculators had mostly been a business tool. This was like a thing you had in your office. At every office everywhere, calculators were huge. And slowly but surely, computers start to eat that market. They can do more stuff. They are more powerful. Eventually, like spreadsheets start to take over. So this idea of I need to do work things shifts from calculator to computer. And even people are starting to bring computers into their homes. Also, calculators are really mature at this point. So if you want just a basic calculator, it's very cheap, which leaves one place left where there is none of this technology where they think they can go. Make a lot of money with calculators. Do you want to guess what that place is? High Speaker 3 (19:45) school. Card dealerships. Speaker 8 (19:48) Points to Nila. No, it's schools. I don't know if you guys remember this, but there was this big debate around this time after Sputnik happened. There was this whole idea of new math. And then