TMS 1000 Microcontroller - By Antonio Martí Campoy - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Early History Of The Microcontroller: It Came From Texas

January 12, 2024 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

Ti’s presentation of the rapid integration of calculator chips.

Although for most generations alive today the era of microcontrollers (MCU) feels like it starts somewhere with the Intel 8051 and AVR MCUs, the history of these self-contained computing marvels that are now found just about anywhere begins long before those were even conceptualized. In a recent article titled Tiny Computers From Texas, [Babbage] goes through this early history of what would ultimately become such an integral part of daily life.

An MCU is defined as a small, self-contained computer, which requires few to no external components to function. This contrasted with the more traditional MPUs, or microprocessor units, where a computer was assembled out of one or more MPUs, I/O chips, memory SRAM and so on. It’s perhaps little surprise that the drive towards MCUs was the result of primarily the calculator market, where competing firms were trying to upstage each other with higher levels of integration into as few chips as possible, while driving down costs and power usage.

Ultimately, the Texas Instruments TMS 1000 was the first true MCU that got produced in large volumes after its release in 1974. Moving beyond calculators, the TMS 1000 found its way into toys, including the Speak & Spell – which uses another Ti chip (TMS 5100) for the voice synthesis – so that today any toy can be interactive in exciting and often noisy ways.

Back in 2020 we took our own affectionate look at this chip.

Dungeons And Dragons Board Game From The 1980s Holds A TMS1100

February 12, 2023 by Matthew Carlson 10 Comments

Today is a little tour back to the early 1980s when Mattel released the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Computer Labyrinth Game. [Cameron Kaiser] was dealing with a few boxes of old stuff when he came across the game. Luckily for us, he decided to do a complete teardown and a comprehensive review more than 40 years after it came out.

The game itself is pretty simple. You and a friend are characters on the board, navigating an eight-by-eight maze. As you move through the labyrinth, a microcontroller emits twelve audio cues telling you what you’ve run into (walls, doors, treasure, and so on). The eight buttons on the side allow you to hear the different tones to know what they mean, as we imagine even the most well-written manual might struggle to describe that. In addition, the pieces are diecast metal, which allows the game to detect where the pieces have been placed. Continue reading “Dungeons And Dragons Board Game From The 1980s Holds A TMS1100” →

The TMS1000: The First Commercially Available Microcontroller

February 18, 2020 by Jenny List 80 Comments

We use a microcontroller without a second thought, in applications where once we might have resorted to a brace of 74 logic chips. But how many of us have spared a thought for how the microcontroller evolved? It’s time to go back a few decades to look at the first commercially available microcontroller, the Texas Instruments TMS1000.

Imagine A World Without Microcontrollers

The Texas Instruments Speak And Spell from 1978 was a typical use for the TMS1000. — The Texas Instruments Speak & Spell from 1978 was a typical use for the TMS1000. FozzTexx (CC-SA 4.0)

It’s fair to say that without microcontrollers, many of the projects we feature on Hackaday would never be made. Those of us who remember the days before widely available and easy-to-program microcontrollers will tell you that computer control of a small hardware project was certainly possible, but instead of dropping in a single chip it would have involved constructing an entire computer system. I remember Z80 systems on stripboard, with the Z80 itself alongside an EPROM, RAM chips, 74-series decoder logic, and peripheral chips such as the 6402 UART or the 8255 I/O port. Flashing an LED or keeping an eye on a microswitch or two became a major undertaking in both construction and cost, so we’d only go to those lengths if the application really demanded it. This changed for me in the early 1990s when the first affordable microcontrollers with on-board EEPROM came to market, but by then these chips had already been with us for a couple of decades.

It seems strange to modern ears, but for an engineer around 1970 a desktop calculator was a more exciting prospect than a desktop computer. Yet many of the first microcomputers were designed with calculators in mind, as was for example the Intel 4004. Calculator manufacturers each drove advances in processor silicon, and at Texas Instruments this led to the first all-in-one single-chip microcontrollers being developed in 1971 as pre-programmed CPUs designed to provide a calculator on a chip. It would take a few more years until 1974 before they produced the TMS1000, a single-chip microcontroller intended for general purpose use, and the first such part to go on sale. Continue reading “The TMS1000: The First Commercially Available Microcontroller” →