TI-84: Monopoly math

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 – It 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, 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.

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 – It 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, 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.