‘With the announcement of Texas Instruments’ first family of medium-scale integrated circuits, the giant has stirred at last’, starts a story in the October 29th 1969 edition of Electronics Weekly.
“Eventually large-scale integration will come and, with it, the need to customise entire systems transforming them, under computer control, into giant etched silicon chips”, continues the account.
“But, until that time, TI hope to by-pass customisation, in the ‘digital field’ at least, by offering the very widest range of standard digital systems”, runs the report.
“Texas are holding ‘a watching brief’ on the metal oxide market”, the article continues, “at present they feel ‘there is no appreciable profit in the metal oxide market in the UK and we are waiting till it is worthwhile introducing it in full scale production’.”
“Unless fickle Texas enacts another of those ‘volte-faces’ it so delights in”, says the EW story, “they will only exploit metal oxides when they go for LSI in a big way, using it as a variant to bipolar.”
Well, since this seems to have come from "TI in the UK", I suppose it vindicates the decision by most of the smart people I knew at TI in the UK, and me, to move to Dallas in the mid-1960s. Having been an innovator in Silicon technology, and then in ICs, it is interesting that TI would have lost it's nerve within 15 years. There must be an object lesson there somewhere?