General Instrument

» see gi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

General Instrument was founded in New York in 1923 and spent its first forty years as the kind of company that shows up in nobody's history of technology: components, tuners, capacitor parts, whatever the electronics industry needed in bulk that year. It grew mostly by acquisition, and in december 1967 it made the purchase that decided the rest of its life, paying $129 million for Jerrold Electronics of Philadelphia and walking into the cable television business at the exact moment cable television started to matter.

For the next three decades, if you had cable in the United States, the box on top of your set was probably built by this company. The Jerrold name was on the converters through the eighties, then General Instrument dropped it around 1993 and put its own name on the hardware. By the end of 1993 the company was turning $1.39 billion a year with about 9,200 employees, and it had the addressable-set-top business more or less sewn up.

I never touched one of those boxes. Cable in Turkey was a different system with different hardware, and the descrambler as an object of household folklore is an American thing that arrived here only as a plot detail in imported films. The part of this company that reached me came out of a completely different division and had no logo on it at all.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the chips ~

General Instrument's microelectronics division made the AY-3-8500, the single chip that put Pong in a plastic box under thousands of televisions in the late seventies, and the AY-3-8910 sound chip that gave the MSX and a long list of arcade cabinets their voice. It made the CP1600 processor inside the Intellivision. It also made, in 1976, a small controller called the PIC1650, meant to handle peripheral chores for that processor.

General Instrument spun the division off as a subsidiary in 1987 and sold it to a group of investors in 1989, who renamed it Microchip Technology and moved it to Arizona. The PIC was the thing they kept. Twenty years later it was the microcontroller every engineering student in Turkey met first, the one on the breadboard in the lab and in every hobby project book on the shelf, and none of us knew we were using the last surviving product line of a cable television company. That is the closest I ever got to General Instrument, several owners downstream and with the original name filed off.

~ the proposal that changed television ~

In 1990 the FCC was running a contest to pick an American high definition television standard, and every serious entry was analog, because digital compression at broadcast quality was understood to be years away. General Instrument entered an all-digital system. It was not obviously buildable, and it forced every competing entry to go digital or withdraw, which is how the process ended up producing the digital standard that eventually replaced analog broadcasting outright.

The company demonstrated its system in 1992 and won a contract for 100,000 compressors. Its DigiCipher work became the encoding used across North American digital cable and satellite for the next twenty years. Somewhere in the middle of this it had also been through a $1.6 billion leveraged buyout by Forstmann Little in august 1990 and a three-way corporate split in 1997, out of which came CommScope and General Semiconductor, with the set-top business briefly named NextLevel Systems before it took the General Instrument name back in february 1998.

~ the day it died ~

Motorola announced the deal on 15 september 1999: an all-stock swap of 0.575 Motorola shares for each General Instrument share, worth about $11 billion at announcement and $17 billion by the time it closed on 5 january 2000. It was the largest acquisition Motorola had ever made. The set-top business became the Broadband Communications Sector and the name came off the products over the following years.

The boxes kept shipping under Motorola, then under Arris after Motorola sold the division in 2013, then under CommScope, which is the same CommScope that General Instrument had spun out of itself in 1997. That circle is the tidiest thing in the whole story. A company can be dead for a quarter century and its hardware still be bolted to the wall of a cable headend, doing the job, under a name that used to be one of its own departments.

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