TI has been in India since 1985 and a pioneer of calculators we grew up with which is just a sliver of their overall product line up that includes Analog Semiconductors, Embedded Processors, Microcontrollers, Digital Signal Processors (DSPs), Power Management Chips. Not exactly a who's-who list to be excited about. But their calculators made the lives of students, traders, professionals, etc. simpler. In the Indian context, a store may not have a computer, but always has a calculator. Then came Casio watches with a calculator but they didn't make a big splash. HP introduced calculators where the students could program a series of steps such as the Runge-Kutta method in numerical analysis. They even sold pre-programmed chips that could be inserted into their calculators. I don't think the evolution of calculators went much farther.
You see why TI calculators didn't have a Genius button? It's because they are Clairvoyant, beyond mere genius. You can win competing with a genius, but a clairvoyant is beyond oracle, ESP and what have you. Most importantly a clairvoyant is humble. In the case of TI, they could have sold their calculators for any price, but they made a fair mark up as there was no expensive supply chain where outsourced parts -- bits and pieces of the hardware--were required. Everything was made in-house except for the India connection.
So what did India contribute to the TI calculator? The obvious answer is software. But what kind of software? You see in the '90s the Presidents of the USA were talking about digital-divide, like haves and havenots in the context of access to information. TI's calculators were handy but don't fit the agenda. Besides, many techies considered them as analog. So the real battle is between analog vs. digital. To understand the difference let's do a Schrodinger cat experiment that is contrived to elaborate on this. You place your cat inside a box and close the lid. You wait for a few minutes and I ask "What is the cat doing now? " If you are digital, you would answer it as "The cat is either dead or alive". Whereas if you are analog you would reply "The cat could be sleeping, licking its paws, rolling on its back and so on". As you can infer, the possibilities with analog are endless.
Given the versatility of analog devices that TI pioneered, why are we using digital computers, digital-this or digital-that? The Chinese found an answer to this conundrum when they made a breakthrough in analog computing. Going back to the cat experiment, your analog response lacked specificity by enumerating many possibilities that would throw someone to tizzy. On the other hand, the digital response is limited to two possibilities with 50% accuracy each. If you bring in probability the analog response could be refined as: the cat is licking its paws with a 0.2 probability, rolling on its back with a 0.1 probability, etc. The issue now, as a mathematician would say, all the probabilities should add up to 1 or unity. Only a clairvoyant knows the correct answer in this case.
But wait, aren't we thinking just like the analogues? If we are digitalists we would only see black and white and nothing in between. We see a variety of shades, so we are not digitalists. Then how come digital computers don't have a problem in displaying shades between black and white? To figure this out we have to ask the geniuses who are called Neurologists if the digital devices have true colors because those of us not color blind ascribe it to them?
At this point, I take a short cut and give one possible answer: it is very likely our brain operates like a digital device and our mind is able to convert it to analog information. So we need both digital and analog to carry out thinking. Going back to what the Chinese did recently, they came up with an analog device that is more energy efficient, fairly accurate and likely cheaper to manufacture than an equivalent digital device.
Imagine you are in a farmer's market in India. The farmer has an analog calculator and you are carrying a digital calculator. If you ask the price of his produce, the farmer comes up with a number. You punch in the number into your calculator and think it is going to be expensive. So you decide to bargain. Because the farmer is holding an analog calculator, he will quote a price "in the ballpark" of what you might be willing to pay. At this stage you can throw away your digital calculator and make the purchase or walk away with your prized possession. Wait, there is another possibility: you can thank the farmer for his willingness to play along.
A genius like Sakuntala Devi might say you are wasting your time by wavering between analog and digital. The crux is learning to count, multiply and divide from a master. You are making your god-given brain lazy by not putting it to good use. You see folks, the human computer, Sakuntal Devi, is not just a genius, but also clairvoyant when applied to AI. She didn't have to change, but we all have to find other uses for our brain/mind that is freed up from cumbersome problem-solving because of TI.
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