Motorola, Inc.

Motorola, Inc.

U.S. manufacturer of wireless communications, electronic systems, and semiconductors. The company was founded in 1928 in Chicago by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin as the Galvin Manufacturing Corp. In 1930 Galvin introduced a low-cost automobile radio under the brand name Motorola, later adding Motorola police radios, home radios, phonographs, two-way radios, and television sets. The company changed its name to Motorola in 1947. Foreseeing a future demand for transistors, Motorola became a leading manufacturer of them in 1958, after licensing a transistor design from Bell Laboratories. Transistor technology led to the development of microprocessors, which Motorola marketed to computer makers in 1974. Although the company worked with IBM Corp. and Apple Computer, Inc. (now Apple Inc.), in 1993 to develop the first consumer RISC (reduced-instruction-set computing) chip, Motorola realized greater success as a producer of embedded microprocessors—ubiquitous in kitchen appliances, pagers, video games, and handheld personal computers. Motorola was also a leader in the development of cellular telephone systems, and many of its cell phone designs became status symbols.

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(company)

Motorola, Inc. - One of the world's leading providers of wireless communications, semiconductors and advanced electronic systems and services. Major equipment businesses include cellular telephone, two-way radio, paging and data communications, personal communications, automotive, defense and space electronics, computers, satellite communications systems, police and emergency service radio systems, taxicab dispatching (radio) systems. Communication devices, computers and millions of consumer products are powered by Motorola semiconductors. They are probably best known in the computing world for their microprocessors, including the Motorola 6800 and Motorola 68000 CISC families and Motorola 88000 RISCs, the Motorola DSP56000 digital signal processors and the PowerPC on which they collaborated. They also led the development of VMEbus. Quarterly sales $5400M, profits $367M (Aug 1994). See also Envoy, Monsoon, MPL. http://mot.com/. Address: Schaumberg, Illinois, USA.