The first on-line coupling of gas chromatography to a mass spectrometer was reported in the late 1950s. An interest in coupling the methods had been suggested as early as December 1954.
The development of affordable and miniaturized computers has helped in the simplification of the use of this instrument, as well as allowed great improvements in the amount of time it takes to analyze a sample.  In 1964, Electronic Associates, Inc. (EAI), a leading U.S. supplier of analog computers, began development  of a computer controlled quadrupole mass spectrometer under the direction of Robert E. Finnigan.  By 1966 Finnigan and collaborator Mike Uthes EAI division had sold over 500 quadrupole residual gas-analyzer instruments. In 1967, Finnigan left EAI to form the Finnigan Instrument Corporation along with Roger Sant, T. Z. Chou, Michael Story, Lloyd Friedman, and William Fies. In early 1968, they delivered the first prototype quadrupole GC/MS instruments to Stanford and Purdue University. When Finnigan Instrument Corporation was acquired by Thermo Instrument Systems (later Thermo Fisher Scientific) in 1990, it was considered "the worlds leading manufacturer of mass spectrometers".