History of the MSP430
There was a little-known predecessor to the MSP430 series in the early 1990s, which was the TSS400 "uPower Programmable High-Precision Sensor Signal Processor". It had only an 8-bit processor, and the ROM contained an interpreter for a language called SMPL, so it was not intended that it be customer-programmed in machine language (or C, or any other "normal" programming language).

While the TSS400 showed promise, ultimately customers wanted a more powerful processor, and the MSP430 was the result.