Texas Instruments Inc finally threw in the towel on the wasting asset of its computer business, and signed a letter of intent to sell it to Hewlett-Packard Co on undisclosed terms. The part to go is the Business Systems line of Motorola Inc 68000- and Intel Corp iAPX-86-based Unix machines that are the direct successors to Texas’s old TI 980 and TI 990 minicomputer business that goes back to the early 1970s. The acquisition will result in an as yet undetermined number of lay-offs because Hewlett-Packard is planning to offer jobs to about 450 of the 1,600 employees in the worldwide Computer Systems & Services business, primarily employees currently in field and customer services functions. Some remaining Texas Instruments employees will be involved in transition efforts that could continue for up to several years, while others will be offered positions elsewhere inside Texas Instruments. Underlining the fact that the business was going nowhere, the transaction is not expected to have a material financial impact on either company. Hewlett-Packard gets a base of some 125,000 multi-user computers, and will continue to offer the existing line until users are ready to migrate to Precision Architecture. The sale does not include any other Texas computer businesses – notebook computers, printers, the software engineering and distributed computing tools, telecommunications systems, or the process automation systems.
