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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." These were the first of a long line of Texas instrument calculators, which continues to this day.

Examples of Texas Instruments calculators

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 calculators see the Calculator Photo Library on this site.

On this site see also the articles:

• Texas Instruments Cal-Tech: World's First Pocket Electronic Calculator
• TI Prototype and Preproduction Models Found!
• Texas Instruments' Klixon Keyboard: The "Premier" early keyboard
• Texas Instruments Calculators 1972 - 1979: How rare are they?

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

Vintage Calculators

© Text & photographs copyright Nigel Tout  2000-2008 except where noted otherwise.