Gary Boone, who worked in the Texas Instruments (TI) MOS Department, devised the first chip that can be called a microcontroller because he was becoming bored with his job and in trouble with his family. He’d joined TI in 1969 just when calculator chips were getting to be big business. During the 1960s, electronic calculators replaced the electromechanical Marchant and Frieden calculators that had owned the market for decades. Semiconductors made it possible to replace the hundreds of intricate ...