Talk:Texas Instruments TMS1000

Still made?

In my 25 minutes of exhaustive research, I couldn't find out when TI stopped selling TMS1000s, if they even have stopped selling it. The TI site isn't helpful here. --Wtshymanski (talk) 00:06, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

I very much doubt they're still made by TI. The microcontrollers section of TI's web site only lists 16-bit and larger products, and TI's site search reveals no instances whatsoever of "TMS1000" or "TMS 1000", which implies that they stopped supporting the product family long ago. Perhaps some other companies still make the design, but I wouldn't be surprised if the 4-bit microcontroller market has been taken over by later products.

As for when TI stopped selling them, while that would certainly be nice to know, it might be hard to find out, especially years after the fact. Chip collections might give some hints of the duration of production, but that's only a lower bound, and, sadly, it also would probably fall afoul of original research. --Colin Douglas Howell (talk) 03:43, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

Well, Commons has a picture of one date coded '85, so it was at least made for that long. No joy with "TMS 1000 last buy" search so far. The chip fan sites so far have been useless as they all repeat each other. --Wtshymanski (talk) 05:24, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

Actually managed to find an example with a late 1990 date code, on visual6502.org, that was used to get die photomicrographs. Looking at the oldest version of TI's website on the Wayback Machine, from late 1996, I still saw no mention whatsoever of the TMS1000 family, not even as end-of-life; the smallest microcontroller mentioned there was 8-bit. If I were to make a statement, I would hedge my bets by saying something like "remained in production well into the 1980s", but I'd guess that production (by TI, at least) ended by the early 1990s. --Colin Douglas Howell (talk) 06:52, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

Should pin it down a lot tighter than a decade...there's enough wooly statements on WP that we don't need to add another one here. But surprised it lasted that long! --Wtshymanski (talk) 17:05, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

The 1974 introduction of the TMS1000, and confusion with the earlier TMS0100 family.

I've added a few citations for the 1974 introduction of the TMS1000. Two are from the Wayback Machine, which has now-defunct TI history pages that give both the introduction year and TI's announcement. Sadly, TI has removed those details from its current website's history pages.

An erroneous date of 1972 is now floating around in some places. Unfortunately, because these days Wikipedia's content is so widely copied and so many people refer to it, I think we ourselves have helped to amplify this date by accepting it without checking.

The error seems to have stemmed from a confusion of several events and chips: TI's 1971 introduction of its first calculator chip (originally designated as the TMS1802), TI's redesignation of this chip as part of a family called the TMS0100, TI's 1972 introduction of its first calculators, which used these chips, and TI's TMS1000 family of general-purpose microcontrollers. But while both the TMS0100 and TMS1000 families could be thought of as 4-bit microcontrollers, they had major differences in internal architecture; the TMS0100 chips were designed specifically for calculator control rather than for general devices.

Texas Instruments's first one-chip calculator IC, publicly announced and offered on the market on September 17, 1971, was initially named the TMS1802. This was part of an existing pattern for TI: they had named their first calculator ICs (which were multi-chip chipsets) as TMC17xx and TMC18xx. (The "C" was for custom devices for a particular vendor; "S" indicated a standard device offered for the open market.) By 1972 TI had renamed the TMS1802 chip as the TMS0102, part of a family of similar chips which all had TMS01xx numbers and shared the same basic design. This left TMS1xxx free for the TMS1000 microcontrollers when they were introduced.

Joerg Woerner's "Datamath" web site has a pretty good reference on the history of TI's calculator chips and their usage both in TI calculators and in those made by other vendors. Another useful reference on the first single-chip calculators is "The Arrival of the 'Calculator-on-a-Chip'" from Nigel Tout's "Vintage Calculators Web Museum".

Some confusion on this subject may come from the page on the TMS1000 from Stan Augarten's 1983 book State of the Art: A Photographic History of the Integrated Circuit, which has been reproduced on a web site, "The Chip Collection", run by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. This states:

... Unlike Intel's chips, TI's microcontroller, a 4-bit device, wasn't put on the general market immediately, but was employed in a TI calculator introduced in 1972. TI refined its invention over the years and finally offered it to the electronics industry in 1974. ...

This is talking about TI's development of the microcontroller in general terms. But its claim that the chip in TI's 1972 calculator wasn't put on the general market immediately is wrong; as I said, TI had publicly introduced it in 1971 and offered it for sale. TI's 1972 calculators were its first entry into that end-product market, using the same devices it had been selling to others. And these were all calculator-oriented chips; TI's 1974 introduction of the TMS1000 was its first device designed as a general-purpose microcontroller.

Although Stan Augarten is himself a computer historian, the book is intended as a pictorial capsule history of the development of integrated circuits, without going into great detail. Nor are its contents given as the Smithsonian's own word on the subject; they include a clear disclaimer: "This book is provided for general reference. The National Museum of American History and the Smithsonian Institution make no claims as to the accuracy or completeness of this work." So one must take care when it makes statements contradicted by other evidence.

--Colin Douglas Howell (talk) 01:14, 11 November 2017 (UTC)