In 1976 Texas Instruments (TI) wanted to design a device that would pronounce a word to be spelt out on a keyboard as a way to teach spelling. It needed to be inexpensive, so it needed to store as many words as possible in about 256◦kbits of memory. It also needed to be portable, so the size and power consumption was also very important. By 1978 TI had managed pack the apparent performance of a several-thousand-dollar computer into the $50 device that we all know as the Speak & Spell thanks to the TMS0280 speech synthesis IC.