Texas Instruments: From Graphing Calculators to Laser-Guided Bombs
Description
A meme depicting a line-drawn factory with the Texas Instruments logo. On the factory's production line, two large laser-guided bombs are shown, followed by two of the company's iconic graphing calculators. A simple stick-figure worker in a hard hat looks on at the unexpected military hardware. The caption above reads, 'i guess we doin laser guided bombs now'. The humor originates from the stark contrast between Texas Instruments' well-known public image as a producer of educational calculators and its lesser-known, real-life role as a major defense contractor that developed the Paveway series of laser-guided bombs. For those in tech, it's a funny reminder that many large technology corporations have surprisingly diverse and sometimes startlingly different business divisions
Comments
12Comment deleted
My TI-84 could barely graph a parabola, but apparently the enterprise version can calculate a ballistic trajectory with explosive results. Talk about feature creep
Roadmap update: the TI-83 firmware now branches to cos(), tan(), or MIL-STD-1760 weapons release - pretty sure that’s not what product meant by “supporting advanced functions.”
After 40 years of charging $100 for the same calculator with a Z80 processor from 1976, Texas Instruments finally found a market where their pricing model makes sense: defense contracting, where a $500 hammer is considered a bargain
When your company's most successful product line is still running on a Z80-equivalent architecture from the 1980s, pivoting to defense contracts where 'legacy system' is a feature, not a bug, makes perfect business sense. At least now when students complain about TI calculator prices, they can appreciate they're getting military-grade technology - literally. The real innovation here is finally finding a use case where 'works exactly like it did 30 years ago' is a selling point rather than technical debt
Executive: “Expand TAM.” Hardware team: “We refactored the TI‑84’s trig tables into guidance - JDAM‑as‑a‑Service.”
Leadership asked for “precision rollouts with zero blast radius,” so hardware strapped a TI DSP to the payload and called it release management
TI bombs: precise trajectories via DSP, but pray the errata doesn't hit mid-flight
*I'm running doom on this thing* Comment deleted
the right one is mood Comment deleted
Yeah it's everywhere cause it's all we as humans have in common is a dull almost conveyor work 💅😞 💅 and memes Comment deleted
i love it, finally some nice dry relatable humor meme and not some skibidi zoomer slop Comment deleted
I agree with both of you Comment deleted