As with many first-of-a-kind devices, the Texas Instruments (TI) TMS0100 calculator chip family was a narrowly defined microcontroller, mostly good for making calculators. However, the first chip in the TMS0100 family, originally called the TM1802NC and later renamed the TMS0102, incorporated everything a microcontroller requires to be a microcontroller: a CPU, RAM, ROM, and I/O. Granted, it was a specialized microcontroller. Its I/O … Read More → "A History of Early Microcontrollers, Part 2: The Texas instruments TMS1000"
I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to feel a little frazzled around the edges, as it were. Things are now progressing so fast that I’m finding it difficult to keep up. I still hear people boasting “We now support PCIe 4.0,” even though PCIe 5.0 is roaming wild and free, and now the folks at Rambus are briefing me on their PCIe 6.0 offerings. … Read More → "Are You Ready for PCIe 6.0?"
Gary Boone, who worked in the Texas Instruments (TI) MOS Department, devised the first chip that can be called a microcontroller because he was becoming bored with his job and in trouble with his family. He’d joined TI in 1969 just when calculator chips were getting to be big business. During the 1960s, electronic calculators replaced the electromechanical Marchant and Frieden calculators that had owned the … Read More → "A History of Early Microcontrollers, Part 1: Calculator Chips Came First"
