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5 months ago

That one is not that much of a stretch. Texas Instruments is first and foremost a semiconductor company. That means its main product is microchips (which TI made commercially viable and was instrumental in proliferating) and things that can be made from microchips like vocal synthesizers (like the Speak and Spell). Built from the ashes of the defunct Geophysical Service Incorporated in 1951, it actually did work for the seismology part of the oil industry and military defense before it invented the handheld calculator in 1967. Thematically, missiles aren't that far off from military submarine navigation systems and covert monitoring of Soviet nuclear tests.

Plus, the underlying math for calculating points in multidimensional space is basically the same regardless of what the space is or what the points represent. A calculator is highly generalized in functionality. So even if TI did start out as a calculator company, it really wouldn't be that hard from an engineering standpoint to take the basic calculation hardware (or more likely, multiple calculators' worth of hardware) and affix it to a missile rather than a dot-matrix screen.

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