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Engineering The World: Stories From The First 75 Years Of Texas Instruments

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This volume celebrates the can-do, risk-taking, creative pioneers of Texas Instruments from its inception in the 1930s as a tiny geophysical exploration company working out of the back of a truck in the oilfields of the Southwest, to its status in the world today as one of the world's leading electronics companies. From the determination of its foundersEugene McDermott, Erik Jonsson, Cecil Green, and Pat Haggertyto the genius of its inventors such as Nobel prizewinner Jack Kilby, TI has transformed the world in seven and a half decades.

In photographs and anecdotes, the book tells TI's history of innovation in products and technologies, including the development of the first commercial silicon transistors, the first integrated circuits, and the first electronic hand-held calculators. Today, this Fortune 500 company is at the forefront of digital signal processing and analog technologiesthe semiconductor engines of the Internet age. TIers are currently working on solutions for large global markets such as wireless and broadband access, and for a variety of emerging markets such as digital projection systems and digital audio.

The seventy-five vignettes making up this history paint a picture of TI and its people, providing a window into a corporate culture that fosters the creativity and mental toughness to compete in the world semiconductor market. The stories, in addition, show TI's staunch sense of fiscal responsibility, civic mindedness, and high ethical standards in its business practices.

266 pages, Hardcover

First published October 18, 2005

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About the author

Caleb Pirtle III

75 books47 followers
Caleb Pirtle III is the author of more than seventy-five books. His novel, Back Side of a Blue Moon, received both the Beverly Hills Book Award and Best of Texas Book Award for Historical Fiction.

He has written four noir thrillers in the Ambrose Lincoln series: Secrets of the Dead, Conspiracy of Lies, Night Side of Dark, and Place of Skulls. . Secrets and Conspiracy are also audiobooks on audible.com. His most recent releases are Back Side of a Blue Moon, Friday Nights Don't Last Forever, Last Deadly Lie, and The Man Who Talks to Strangers. His short stories are featured in three anthologies: Run, Scream, and Bridges.

Pirtle is a graduate of The University of Texas in Austin and became the first student at the university to win the National William Randolph Hearst Award for feature writing. Several of his books and his magazine writing have received national and regional awards.

Pirtle has written two teleplays: Gambler V: Playing for Keeps, a mini-series for CBS television starring Kenny Rogers, Loni Anderson, Dixie Carter, and Mariska Hargitay, and The Texas Rangers, a TV movie for John Milius and TNT television. He wrote two novels for Berkeley based on the Gambler series: Dead Man’s Hand and Jokers Are Wild. He wrote the screenplay for one motion picture, Hot Wire, starring George Kennedy, and John Terry.

Pirtle’s narrative nonfiction, Gamble in the Devil’s Chalk is a true-life book about the fights and feuds during the founding of the controversial Giddings oilfield and From the Dark Side of the Rainbow, the story of a woman’s escape from the Nazis in Poland during World War II. His coffee-table quality book, XIT: The American Cowboy, became the publishing industry’s third best selling art book of all time.

Pirtle was a newspaper reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and served ten years as travel editor for Southern Living Magazine. He was editorial director for a Dallas custom publisher for more than twenty-five years.

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Displaying 1 of 1 review
173 reviews55 followers
November 24, 2021
This book was a drag - but if you're looking for a history lesson in TI (which was what I was doing) it pretty much hit the mark.

Overwhelming amount of anecdotes and data - but helpful.
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