Texas Instruments began its corporate life in 1930 as a company called Geophysical Service, which was a petroleum-exploration firm founded by a couple of eager men by the names of Dr. J. Clarence("Doc") Karcher and Eugene McDermott. They used seismology to find oil. It entered the defense electronics business during the 1940's and performed contracts for the Army and Navy Signal Corps. The company's name changed to Texas Instruments in 1951 and bought the rights to manufacture the germanium transistor in 1952 from a similar company by the name of Western Electronics for the astronomical price of twenty-five thousand dollars. Geophysical service soon became a subsidiary. This sale was ideal for this growing company. The transistor made possible the portable transistor radio and set the stage for the modern age of electronics. In 1960 another milestone was reached. The company had introduced its first commercially available integrated circuits (also generally known as semiconductors, or chips). In the early 1970's, the company developed a single-chip microprocessor, and introduced a four-ounce portable calculator, which was pretty bulky for that day and age, but was impressive for them at that time. Later in the decade the company began marketing an electronic watch that sold for about twenty dollars and a home computer. Up to that time Texas Instruments was doing very impressively, but the early 1980's was generally disappointing, as the company lost share in both semiconductor and consumer electronics markets. But in the late 1980's they introduced the world's first quantum effect transistor and they formed a joint venture with Acer Inc. to manufacture advanced semiconductors in Japan. With these new products and ventures in addition with a new campaign and a re-emphasis on its semiconductors, business brightened the company's prospects by the beginning of the 1990's.
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