A normal American company

What's a cruise missile if not an advanced calculator with an engine, some fins, some sensors and some servos.

Calculators? Did you mean "machines that can run DOOM"

tbf they are "TEXAS" instruments, this is very texas of them.

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College Board issues aside, I have fond memories of TI-BASIC, writing in it a 3D graphing engine and a stock market analyzer. With enough patience, I could make anything ... but friends. (Although with my chatterbot experiments, I certainly tried.)

Computer Shopper was the shit back in the day. Imagine Newegg's listings of computer hardware bound up every month into a catalog.
- I'd still like that to be available now so when I take shits in a scif I have something to read.

There are no instruments more Texan.

You’d think they would make banjos.
- That's Alabama.

Good ol' "aerospace and defense" industry. The backbone of every healthy society.

The largest teat in the whole country.

They are a company that makes thinky-sand.

First they realized that if they forced everyone to use their thinky sand at school, they could charge a massively inflated price.

Then they realized that if they made the thinky-sand go boom, they could charge whatever they wanted.

Teaching sand to think was a mistake.
- Found Butler's lemmy account!

If you never sat around in class playing Pokémon on your TI-84 Plus after you finished your math exam earlier than the rest, you have no idea what true power feels like.

I wasn't ti-84 plus rich. But I was palm pilot tungsten E rich, and played Pokemon and drug wars during class.
Back in the day we would type 58008 on our calculator and turn it upside down to satisfy our porn needs...
Wtf Pokémon? I thought I was hot shit with brick break and a couple other minor apps if I remember
- And here I only had connect 4 and junk programmed into my Casio
- Dramatic exaggeration I assume. But there was a Super Mario clone (at least on my TI Voyage 200).

This is like General Mills, the cereal company, making submersibles like DSV Alvin.

If you eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch while exploring the sea bed in the Alvin, you're still using the same company for both lol

If you think TI's set of manufactured products is insane, look at a Japanese Keiretsu like DKB or South Korean Chaebol, like Daewoo.

Hitachi, man. Do you need an air conditioner? A hydrolic excavator? A pussy diddler? A 120mm self propelled mortar? If all of the above, they're the company for you.
- Don't forget nuclear power.
The joke is exactly that Japanese and SK company make everything, differently from the US ones.

You know you won capitalism when you start manufacturing weapons. Take notes people.

TI sold their defense segment business to Raytheon in the late 90s. I don't think they make missiles anymore.

As the defense industry consolidated, TI sold its defense business to the Raytheon Company in 1997 for $2.95 billion. […] ^[1]

References

"Texas Instruments". Wikipedia. Published: 2025-01-04T02:02Z. Accessed: 2025-01-09T19:01Z. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments#Missiles_and_laser-guided_bombs.

§"History". §"Defense Electronics". §"Divestiture to Raytheon". ¶1.