My TI-85 story. While I was in prison, around 1996 or 1997, I found out a friend had a TI-85 calculator. I realized it was programmable, so I borrowed it over the weekend and wrote a program to track his stock portfolio. It was the first time I had programmed anything in 2 or 3 years.
Then I learned that the US Bureau of Prisons had a rule against any calculator (or device) that was "programmable". So I programmed the TI-85 so its startup screen read, "TI-85 NON-PROGRAMMABLE CALCULATOR". Problem solved.
Me in math class in 1996 - I had a TI-82 things are programmable so I have no formal education, my parents are illiterate, and taught myself to program, and I begged them to buy me one.
I spent time learning how to code on it, writing from scratch, the game Spyhunter.
I couldn't figure out how to draw with lines or pixels so I used ASCII or text.
I presented this to my teacher who told me "these aren't for games". I was crushed.
I'm not sure how much he actually used it after I wrote it for him, to be honest! But we did have access to daily newspapers, and some of us got weekly stock charts called "Daily Charts" by Investor's Business Daily (all paper, of course). Some of us were into trading stocks (this was during the Internet boom 1995-2000). Another weird skill I learned that is still useful to this day.
How long were you locked up in the clink for? Did you get any access to computers there? How did your time there affect you or change how you think? Thanks for sharing
I served 60 months of the 70 month sentence. I had a computer restriction, so I couldn't be around a computer.
Since I wasn't able to use computers or the Internet for that time, I did/read/learned a lot of things I wouldn't have otherwise learned. Learned how to make hooch (prison wine), how the law works and how to maneuver the court system (useful for both civil and criminal cases), got more fluent in French by speaking with some native French speakers from Benin, learned how to work out & lift weights (which I still do), and learned the value of freedom.
They did! The TI-89 is how I aced the AP Math exam.
The TI-92 had recently come out, and it had a QWERTY keyboard and could solve symbolic calculus problems like "find the derivative of 2x^3". This was a problem for the AP exam, since you could just type in the problem and get the answer. They fixed this by banning calculators with QWERTY keyboards. That's just about exactly when the TI-89 came out, which also did symbolic calculus but did not have a QWERTY keyboard, and so it was totally allowed on the exam. Boom, 5/5 exam score for Jorji.
I was told that one of the designers graduated high-school in '81 and college in '85, so the HS calculator was an 81 and the college calculator was an 85.
They had different models with different capabilities. As they made minor style changes, they bumped the numbers slightly. The 81–82–83–84 were basically the same concept, as were the 85–86. The 89 and 92 were higher-end models. The 80 and 73 are simpler models intended for middle school.
All of them are basically a multi-generational scam perpetrated against the hapless parents of American high school students who were told that they needed to buy overpriced anachronistic calculators for their kids to succeed in school. In my opinion the calculators have overall caused more pedagogical harm than benefit; the students would be better served by some combination of (a) problems that can be solved without the tedious but trivial numerical calculations these calculators support, or (b) are solved using a real programming language. If someone really wants to assign simple numerical problems, give the kids slide rules.
Calculators of this type used to make sense for an engineer doing work in the field somewhere, but make no sense in the context of a classroom.
The scam doesn’t just work in the US. In The Netherlands most secondary school students had, and I think still have, to buy these. I imagine in other countries too.
There is an interesting side effect from having always used TI calculators. They use a dot as the decimal separator, not a comma like we do here.
There is usually some option to switch, but the hardware button obviously stays the same, so I’ve always been taught to just make that switch in my head, and it has become the natural thing for me to do.
I see 1,000.50 on a screen I write down 1.000,50.
When I use software that uses a comma as the decimal separator, I get annoyed and it takes some mental effort to enter the right values.
Huh. I have only good memories of this calculator. Would buy for my kids in a heartbeat. The fact that it barely changed is a feature to me. I know exactly what they’d be getting.
… that continues no matter what. I gave my kid my 89 from the late 90s—I was happy to avoid the TI student tax. Then a year or two back, the college board banned the 89 from certain tests/classes and so I had to cough up for an 84. Even if you take care of your stuff, treat it well to pass on to your kids, the Man finds a way to extract their cut.
I think you can flash a TI83 Plus ROM to a TI73 by using an exploit? One exploit was that flashing an OS writes all the ROM, then checks the signature afterwards, then erases it if it fails. Pull batteries at the correct time and...
One other factor that others haven't yet covered is that the different lines had different capabilities, e.g. the T-89 had Computer Algebra System symbolic manipulation meaning it could pretty much solve many types of math problems on its own, so it wasn't generally allowed in school. And then the Ti-85/86 was a step down, but had matrix support that the lower models lacked, so it was necessary for some specific types of classes.
My favorite was always the TI-85/86 line. I loved those F1-F5 buttons right beneath the screen, which made the interface overall better to navigate. The first programming I ever did was on one of those (either the 85 or 82, can't exactly remember at this point which I owned first). And, the only thing of note I ever had stolen from me was a TI-82, taken out of my unattended backpack by another student during gym class :( (And I had even carved my name into the back of it with a knife, so it would've been identifiable.)
They were different lines. The numbers aren't mean to be chronological; similar to how AMD released some 5000 series AM4 Ryzen chips long after they'd moved on to AM5 and 7000/9000 series.
TI83 (1996) was a successor to the TI82 (1993) which was a refresh/update of the TI81 (1990).
TI85 (1992) was the second model they made, originally intended as a higher end version of the TI81.
Similar reasoning for the rest of their line up. Different models had different features, and then those models would get incremental updates/refreshes over the years.
I wasn't part of the team or anything, so if anyone has any insight to why exactly they called it that in the first place, I'd be interested to know, but generally speaking the answer is: When they released the first one in 1990, they didn't name it under the presumption that this family of devices would be a staple educational/academic electronics device for the next 3 decades with dozen(s?) of different iterations/generations over the years.
A lot of it had to do with capability. The TI 92 was considerably more capable than the 83. The 89 had better software than the 92 but with a smaller form factor. The 92+ was the 92 with the 89 software.
About 25 years ago my parents got me a Ti84 as a surprise for Christmas and they hid it in the attic so I couldn't find it in the meantime. A few months went by and a couple days before Christmas, when it was time to wrap the presents they couldn't find it anymore. My dad went out and got a Casio something as a late minute replacement, and that was the calculator I used in high school and I never knew about this story. Then last year I found a Ti84 in my parents attic...
My dad got a free palm pilot m125 or something and I used a ti/HP calculator emulator on it since my parents thought buying a $99+ calculator was too expensive. fun writing apps in basic for that thing and the games for it were the best mobile ones. I did envy people with Mario and drug wars on their calculators though.
Must have been closer to 20 years, 84(+) didn't come out until 2004.
Gonna be pedantic/crotchety about this because I got into advanced math classes but it was my brother who got the 84+ (I had to settle for a 83+). Guess who's the engineer now, and who's the NEET? Your kids pay attention to what (who) you value, folks.
Genuinely not sure. Are you the brother that spited your family with a successful career or the one whose life was was doomed by a graphing calculator.
I don't remember there being much of a difference between the 83 and 84. Did you care about the amount of memory or the clock speed of the processor? Or was it more of a status thing.
> I got into advanced math classes but it was my brother who got the 84+ (I had to settle for a 83+)
I had a TI-85 (maybe 86), unlike the entire rest of my school who had 83s.
There was a difference: when programming in TI-Basic, variable names on a TI-83 are limited to a single character. On the 85, you can make them longer.
But that was pretty much the only difference, and it will never come up if you're using the calculator for school-related reasons.
(For calculus, I had an 89. The differences are much more significant there.)
The TI-85 also didn't have a lot of the built-in statistical functions that the TI-83 had.
I also was the one person with a TI-85 in a school of 83s. But by the time I took the statistics class I knew enough BASIC to write my own programs to replicate the functionality that was missing.
I was a self taught TI-Basic programmer and ran into the 26 variable limit on a choose-your-own-adventure style game I wrote. I ended up breaking it into 3 programs so I had enough variables. Programs could invoke other programs so I could navigate between states.
NEET means "Not in Education, Employment, or Training". The stereotype is an unemployed young adult living with their parents and playing video games all day.
Somewhat related. My mom once yelled at me for losing a necklace she really liked. Then we were moving her stuff out of her house and found the necklace behind a wardrobe, wedged between it and the wall. It had been there for like 40 years, layered in dust.
On 9 July 1537, Martin Luther wrote in a letter to Wolfgang Capito about a lost golden ring: "Pro annulo aureo gratias tibi agit mea Catharina, quam vix unquam magis indignatam vidi, quam ubi sensit, cum vel furto sublatum, vel sua negligentia (quod nec mihi verisimile est, licet usque ingerenti) amissum, quod persuaseram ei, hoc donum esse felix omen et augurium ei missum, tanquam nunc certum esset, vestram Ecclesiam cum nostra suaviter concordare; id mire dolet mulieri."[1]
When Luther's house in Wittenberg was excavated about 20 years ago, a golden ring[2] was found that must have been deposited there before 1540. It is therefore quite likely that this is the ring mentioned by Luther in 1537.
My Catherine thanks you for the golden ring, whom I have hardly ever seen more indignant than when she realized that it had been stolen or lost through her own negligence (which is not likely for me, although I still insist on it), which I had persuaded her that this gift was a happy omen and augury sent to her, as if it were now certain that your Church would agree pleasantly with ours; this grieves the woman wonderfully.
My mom once was getting ready for work and I hear a pop and hear my mom yelling. I go in and her necklace fell off the dresser; a "dust buster" wall wart was plugged in back there and it fell across the prongs, shorting it out.
The ground pin, when "up", is higher than the hot, so in certain situations it can prevent something from shorting the hot and neutral. Code (?) or convention requires it if you have a metal faceplate, and hospitals require it. People generally like them mounted ground down because then they look like little faces. :-)
Wouldn't it short hot and ground then, and still turn the necklace into a short-lived fuse?
The more practical reason to mount ground down is that wall warts with ground pins or polarized prongs nearly universally arrange them so that they're hanging down when inserted into a ground-down plug. If the plug's flipped, the wall wart's upside down and its weight is trying to lever it out of the wall.
Yes, in that case it would short hot and ground, which is effectively the same and hot and neutral, since at the main panel hot and ground are bounded together. But if it were, say, a metal credit card or something rigid, it might just fall on the ground, or could hit the ground and neutral.
> 3x Processing Power - Matching one of the speculated options, the calculator appears to use an ARM Cortex CPU, finally retiring the z80 and ez80 family of CPUs that were used in three decades of TI-83 and TI-84 Plus graphing calculators. It's running at 156MHz, compared to the 48MHz of the older calculators. It appears likely that in an unexpected break from over 30 years of TI's operating system codebase, the OS has been re-implemented with new features natively on the ARM CPU rather than using an ez80 emulator to run an updated form of the TI-84 Plus CE operating system.
It looks like TI is finally moving away from the Z80. This must have been a pretty big engineering effort on TI's part. Like the article says, up to this point all of TI's low-end graphing calculators have been Z80 based and use the same system software that has a lineage dating back to the early 1990s. They were previously so wedded to the Z80 that when they introduced Python programming to their calculators, they did so by adding an ARM microcontroller that runs MicroPython, while the main eZ80 CPU acts as a serial terminal.
Much nostalgia. The TI-83 Z80 was how I learned assembly as a teenager, so I could write better calculator games than was possible with TI Basic. Many others here had a similar experience, I’m sure. It’s been a couple decades, but I’m sure I’d still remember most of it if you put me down in front of a bunch of Z80 asm code.
One thing that I remember vividly was you had no MUL or DIV, so you have to implement them yourself with shifts, adds, subtraction, etc. This was an extremely useful learning experience
Same story here (basic was too slow for a phoenix/movable-ship-shooter game).
Do you think you could remember most of Z80 ASM? I looked at some old ASM I wrote long ago, and it's hard to follow the logic of the program, since most lines are messing around with the registers. But basics like 'ld hl,xyz' and 'jp/jnz' still make sense.
> Do you think you could remember most of Z80 ASM?
I find when you learn things at 15 they tend to stick around. (Stuff I learned last week, not so much!) Even just looking at your example, I remembered that HL is a 16 bit register and you can split it into two 8 bit registers H and L if you want. I think most of it would come back; I wrote quite a lot of it, both for the TI-83 and later for a Z80 that I bought and put on a breadboard and wired up to some RAM and EEPROM, about as bare metal as it gets.
> most lines are messing around with the registers
Fun memory trip. Learned assembly on those old Z80s in middle school. I had to go re-dig up SafeGuard, a program I made by reverse engineering TI's TestGuard, to stop admins from wiping your calculator memory and all your games! https://mikeknoop.com/upload/safeguard/
Real shame since cortex has a admin TrustZone processor that is licensed to special interests only. For the educational market, this "security" is a selling point. It guarantees that a student isn't running unauthorized code or "cheating" apps. It also likely allows OTA auditing of the classroom's state.
> Real shame since cortex has a admin TrustZone processor that is licensed to special interests only.
This is substantially inaccurate.
1) Not all ARM Cortex series CPUs have TrustZone. It is absent on many Cortex-M microcontrollers, for example.
2) TrustZone is an operating mode of the CPU, not an "admin processor". Depending on the part, it is often made accessible to developers. (Whether that includes third-party software developers is, of course, up to the device manufacturer.)
There’s a discussion to be had on the absolutism of technology for decisions or security, and the slow erosion of a certain intangible “discretionary” element in day-to-day life.
* I used the programming functionality of the calculator to get around the rules
* I didn't care much for the math, but my TI calculator was my first programming experience and it's what got me to love programming
My experience is similar. We were allowed to use our TI-85s in class, but we had to go up to the teacher before the test and show him that we were running a factory reset, to prove we had nothing programmed in it to cheat.
My buddy and I had made a two player blackjack game and didn't want to have to retype it after every test. So instead we made a program that mimicked the factory reset process. You would run the program before walking up tot he front.
The only indication something was different was the three little dots in the corner indicating a programming was running, but we just covered that with our thumbs.
Ironically we never used it to cheat, only to not erase our game that we programmed!
We had to buy those calculators for highschool and it was a waste of money, felt like somebody must be paying somebody off to have thousands of students buy a device that they will certainly never have to use (and is of little educational value).
I certainly got a lot of educational value out of mine. I managed to program a fully functional Minesweeper game on mine, using the built-in programming tools - no transferring efficient binaries via cable!
But yes. 99% of what we did with them in class - when we were even allowed to use them - could have been handled by a little solar-powered calculator with basic arithmetic functions.
Programming mine in high school is how I ended up coding for the first time and led to my current career. Honestly a pretty good investment (from my parents) I'd say.
Same for me, it was also my first time ever seeing code, and I still remember it well. While getting ready for swim practice in a locker room, my friend challenged me to beat his score on a button mashing game he programmed earlier that day in school on his TI-84. My 12 year old self was in awe of his BASIC skills.
It wasn't the first time I programmed but it was first time I encountered problem solving with code.
I'm not one those (very admirable) people who build just to build, who make their own version of frogger or something. I need a problem to solve.
But making a program that would take the parameters of a physics problem and spit out all the other quantities or that formatted output the way my stats teacher wanted it was a huge timesaver and that motivated me.
I bounced off a python 2 tutorial and a C tutorial, but some random nobody's TI-BASIC tutorial that started really damn easy is how I became a Computer Scientist.
I eventually figured out python too!
I made my own game and got a little notoriety around the school for it.
In my school, I was part of a group of students who hand-programmed games on TI-81 or TI-82 calculators using TI-BASIC. No cable transfers. Games included: Hangman, Missile Command, Minesweeper, and R-Type. Looking back, it was really amazingly impressive. Both what those calculators could do and how much free time we had to make them do it.
I programmed a Mandelbrot generator on my TI-81 (if I remember the model correctly) when I should have been paying attention in class. Entering the code was slow and painful - fortunately the algorithm is fairly simple. The batteries lasted forever, until one day I set the bailout to a ridiculously high value, given the limited resolution, and walked away.
We made multi-player games over the link cables in the early 1990s. We certainly learned a ton from building those. It's not clear how much the calculators added to the math and chemistry classes where we were supposed to use them.
It’s not that the calculator was more than what students need, it’s that even for what it was the TI83/84 was way overpriced. It could have been like $20 at the scale they were produced.
Current smartphones are highly optimized for content consumption a.k.a doom scrolling. Nothing serious exists for programming. On top of that, a touch keyboard and hard to reach special characters make programming on a modern smartphone a big chore. I miss the old days of smartphones that had a hardware keyboard with tactile feedback. I used to code up and maintain a PHP based dynamic website circa 2007 with a Sony Ericsson K770i and upload through a J2ME based FTP client that also had the text editor in it. If I remember it correctly it was called MobyExplorer
Not sure I agree. You can "blind type" on a physical keyboard, and even if it has less sophistication in the way of inputting large amounts of text (lack of auto complete, lack of fuzzy typing/auto correct), a calculator is purpose built with tons of shortcuts and contextual menus that you access from muscle memory without second guessing yourself. Right now, if I've got a mildly complicated mathematical expression to type, I'd rather do it on a last-century calculator rather than e.g. on Android's GeoGebra.
I like Codea for iOS, though the free version has a soft-limit at 500 lines. If a project gets bigger than 500 lines you can still run code but it'll nag you to upgrade.
I don't have a favorite. I do not feel like anyone that I am aware of has made proper investment to make a quality development app for mobile due to the low market demand. While development is better than on a calculator I think they are below my expectations.
You're paying $100 for completely antiquated hardware where its core feature is "it doesn't do much".
Pretty much any professional environment that you will need calculations will have access to a computer that can do these calculations significantly faster and better.
I thought my HP was pretty cool in high school, but pretty much the moment I graduated I stopped using it because I figured out how to use Excel and/or a programming language to do number crunchy stuff. Even for CAS stuff, I would just use Wolfram Alpha or SageMath (depending on how ambitious I'm feeling with setting stuff up).
I can't remember the last time I used a calculator outside of showing someone else how to use it.
Well I'd add to that - the real core feature is that the teacher and usually the textbook show you exactly how to use it, that's why it gets listed specifically as a course requirement.
That unfortunately is also why they can charge so much and people buy them anyway, because at best you'll be on your own to learn how to use anything else (and at worst you won't be allowed to use it at all for tests and such).
There are many professional examples outside of teaching (construction, lab based science, field work, engineering, healthcare, retail) where a calculator, not necessary a programmable one, is useful because the environment restricts the use of computers due to safety, security or practicalities.
My buddy was a general contractor. They have books of pre-printed calculators for common beam lengths. For instance, say you have a room 30 feet wide and you're putting a roof on it with a 30 degree pitch. The book will tell you exactly how long to cut the roof timbers so that they reach from the edge of the wall to the crest of the roof.
Said friend was at a site and someone had misplaced the book. He pulled out a calculator and did some basic trig to give them the lengths and told them to get back to work. He said they were looking at him like he'd just conjured a demon or something. "You can... just calculate that?" "How did you think they made the book?" "But how'd you learn to do that?" "In that math class you dropped in high school."
Yeah I guess I should correct and say that I do use an HP 50G emulator on my iPhone cuz I like RPN.
But even still, the iPhone can do many things and is many times more capable, and you can buy a used iPhone 12 that works fine for about the same price as one of these calculators.
Also, one of the major (unique?) UX innovations of the physical HP48 (c. 1990) was that it could beam apps and data to other calculators over serial IR or RS-232 with a computer. (A DIY computer interface cable could be fashioned from Sony CD-ROM analog audio cable.) Furthermore, the IR LED on the HP48G(X) was so bright, it could be software-controlled as a very long range TV universal remote, and there was a learning universal remote app that could learn codes from physical remotes by reading from the IR receiver. It would take fast and ubiquitous wireless networking (WiFi, BT, and cellular) c. 2003 before the app store concept would arrive generally for smartphones and other devices.
I distinctly remember my teachers having a debate around whether or not the functions I had programmed into my calculator were "cheating". On one hand, it was a tool and notes that I had access to my peers did not. On the other hand, I had created those tools myself, and if school was supposed to train me for the real world, wouldn't I be able to use the tools I created in the real world?
Ha in my school's math department the cheating thesis won and my silly single variable CAS system (which in retrospect did nothing you couldn't do with the graph functions!) got calculator programs banned. Luckily enough my specific math teacher that year didn't care enough to enforce it and it was soon forgotten
Agreed, it's insane to me that in an era of Google Colab (et al) schools still require students to shell out >$100 for one of these. I'm sure there is some backroom arrangement with schools of some kind.
A lack of functionality is the point. You don't want a full CAS or Internet search results available, or many students will just take the easy route and not learn anything.
Neither teachers nor school districts have the time or resources to audit every new tool someone wants to use, or to help students figure out how to use their preferred tool to do something - find something that works and just use that
I had a cheap Casio fx calculator. It got me all the way through my exams in school and university. I had Mathematica at home.
While I can see that being very good on a TI-84 would help you complete exams faster and get better marks, is that a skill that we want students to learn? Being good on a fancy calculator is essentially useless in real life. In real life people use computers not fancy calculators.
IMO it's better to either allow only basic calculators, or to allow real mathematics software.
One perk I found is that if I kept it in RPN mode, people stopped asking to borrow my calculator, which was a valid excuse to learn how to use RPN, which is basically all I use now (and indirectly made me really love the Forth language).
Mine was a Casio fx-something. Teachers didn't like it but it didn't let me cheat and it was just the right amount of functionality to help me with math. Carried me through Pre-Cal, Trig, Calculus and Differential Equations.
That was my first graphing calculator in high school, because it was way cheaper than the equivalent TI. Like seriously 1/4 the price for "beginning of the school year" sales.
That thing was fine, and if I hadn't dropped it and broken it, I probably would have kept using it for the rest of high school. I eventually replaced it with an HP.
I had a TI-83 in high school and upgraded to a TI-89 for college circa 2002. Used the heck out of those calculators because I did all the math and physics prerequisites for an engineering degree before switching to CS. It also helped me get a B in Linear Algebra thanks to holding a cheat sheet document for the final exam. I had no trouble with the likes of Calculus 3 and differential equations but for some reason the later material in linear algebra didn't click with me.
TI-86 is the one in my case. We had to buy it in high school, and I used it so much in high school and in university after (I still have it in a box), that it's the only calculator I've since used. I absolutely have to have a TI emulator on my phone, and have paid for multiple ones along the years.
I use my emulated TI-86 every other day, and prefer it to any other UI I've seen on calculators on phones.
When I have a laptop available, I of course use excel or wolfram alpha for anything demanding, but when on the go, I like my emulated TI-86.
30 years ago, we had the option of the TI-82 Or (83?) and the 85. A bunch of the kids with the 85 were playing Tetris and some were writing little programs. I got the cheaper 82/83, and I don't actually remember using it for anything, even once, even though I did the IB track (stats, trig, algebra, calculus, etc).
I was in the not-TI-85 club for a while. I think I had the TI-84? You could still write programs but your variable names could only be one letter. When I upgraded to a TI-85 and got Tetris a friend who had the not-TI-85 asked if his could play Tetris. I checked out the Tetris code and saw there were less than 26 variables, so I figured it could be done. I spent several English class periods porting the TI-85 Tetris code to the not-TI-85 and I got it to work. All the not-TI-85 owners loved me, lol!
Back in the mid-90's we had a TI version of sneakernet where you would copy programs from one student on to your TI-85 via a link cable; this is how I got Tetris back in the day. I assume OP did the same.
Was it that only the 85 could connect to a com port, but then you could connect the 85 to the 82/83? I seem to remember pleading with the one kid with an 85 (who didn't even care about games).
IIRC there was a way to connect the TI-85 to your serial port and use some Windows or DOS software to copy files onto it. (Everyone's PC still had at least one serial port on it back then).
(Edit: I am assuming you were asking how it's possible I didn't use it, not how it's possible that people were copying programs onto their calculators.)
I don't know. It's been too long. We must have done graphing on paper.
I don't remember a lot of coursework in math that required me to produce a decimal value. For example, we wanted √2 instead of 1.414.
In physics, I think we used regular calculators.
I used to be bewildered at my parents not remembering certain things from high school. But, now I'm living it :).
I don't know how the TI-85 compares to the other models without looking it up, but there's a forever soft spot in my heart for mine. It got me through a comp sci degree and still works flawlessly today.
Same. But I agree with the parent, I always got the vibe it was a giant racket between public schools and TI. Writing code for it was probably cool back in the 80s-90s but it's so dated now.
It's wild how much curricula within high schools must differ, because my school went out of its way to teach and encourage/require its use on nearly every quiz and exam. We joked sometimes class felt more like calculator class than math class. This was Texas, too, which I hardly consider a pioneer in education. Maybe TI pride?
Now that I think about it, this could have been a strategy my high school drilled into us as a way to increase SAT scores, since TI-84s were allowed to be used there.
>We had to buy those calculators for highschool and it was a waste of money, felt like somebody must be paying somebody off to have thousands of students buy a device that they will certainly never have to use (and is of little educational value).
I suppose it depends if you took advanced math classes or not.
My high school required one for a math curriculum that was specifically designed with the idea that students would not need advanced math classes. It kids up for failure if they were hoping to move toward higher level math in college, as the fundamentals were never adequately taught. But at least they sold thousands of calculators to kids who would never use them again.
They actually started us on them in 7th or 8th grade.
This is probably right, but just to note that it's very much a generational thing. When I got a TI-83 (and then eventually an 89!) it was easily the most advanced handheld computing hardware I had ever been exposed to. The iPhone made sense to me, and I knew it would be huge, the day it came out because of these amazing calculators.
I know technology has moved on and all, but much nostalgic respect to these amazing calculators.
Definitely. At the very least, given the slow change in which ones are accepted, a cheap rental setup seems like the baseline that should exist... but everyone had to buy their own for my schools.
TI is like the Intuit of the education world. I want to love them but this is ridiculous - a N4120 celeron laptop is the same price as this new calculator - it might be a garbage laptop but it's doing a heck of a lot more for your $160 than this calculator is.
Well, the TI-83/84 are called a graphing calculators for a reason: you can plot equations and datasets with them and look at them right there[1]. Looking at graphs is huge for learning, or at least it was for me, and school isn't just about plugging things in and getting an answer (or shouldn't be, at least).
Doesn't mean it's not overpriced, but that's one reason and you can get a used TI-83/84 for like $30 or less. They pretty much never break.
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1. Okay, the Casio can QR-code-link you to a graph, but if I have internet/smartphone there are better graphing tools anyway, like Desmos.
I mean a laptop running windows can use the old power toy calculator or something like speed crunch to do graphing and I'm sure Linux has countless others, with Chromebooks probably having more for free online as well, I can only assume.
International Baccalaureate math has some stats questions that require a calculator that can do stats questions. Not really possible by hand in exam conditions!
My Casio FX-260 Solar IIs [1][2] (I recently bought 3 more of them) cost me $5 CAD a piece on clearance at Walmart. No battery, a modern solar panel that works great even in dimly lit rooms, and a modern SOC with all the standard scientific calculations, scientific notation, engineering notation, significant figures, and all the basic stats calculations too (sum, mean, pop stddev, sample stddev, permutations, combinations, factorials).
It’s my favourite calculator and the one I always reach for, despite having a bunch of more complicated 2-line calculators etc. It’s just so easy to use and very fast to do anything I’d want with a calculator. If I need graphing I’ll reach for Desmos. If I need algebra I’ll use Sage. I haven’t used Sage since my undergrad, however.
The basic $12 Casio scientific has stats like mean, standard deviation, regression... Stats is a huge field, we're talking highschool level. I think it probably covers it
Oh that’s neat! Probably should’ve checked your link. Not sure what the advantage of the Ti-84 would be for highschool math, but the UX on NumWorks calculators is completely a game changer, especially with stats and graphing questions.
Maybe everything is possible on the Casio, but it’s so much clearer on the NumWorks (especially for eg. Physics questions, where you might want to retrieve values you calculated earlier with full precision, etc). Genuinely felt like a cheat code when I was in highschool. I showed mine to my teacher and they swapped the whole’s schools standard calculators from the Ti-84 CE to the NumWorks, which is cheaper too.
Includes GCD and LCM, some of the newer ones don't have them.
If you want graphing, there is the newish fx-CG100 has a nice display, but they removed Casio basic, it now only has micro Python (way too awkward to type on a tiny keypad):
I agree with you on the Casio fx-115ES Plus 2nd Edition. I picked one up two years ago for $11.41. It naturally writes out equations, has a backspace and is generally excellent. I still love my HP RPN calculators, but the fx-115ES works nicely for anyone who isn't using RPN or sympy.
There is no graphing problem that you'll be asked to solve before university that can't be plotted to a 'good enough for high school' level by hand in seconds.
Four data points is sufficient to give you a 'good enough' shape and position of a second-degree polynomial. Five or six for a third-degree one. (And you barely see them, and don't learn how to algebraically solve for their roots in high school anyways, because the cubic factoring formula is a pig.)
If you can't tell what a function's plotted shape is going to be at a glance, you haven't learned the material to the degree expected of an attentive child.
Life is not all about solving problems, high school life even less so.
Personally, I found great enjoyment in coming up with more and more involved plots in the Polar and Parametric modes, where yes I would predict what a graph would look like and then go over to see it. And then go back and iterate. Etc. Until I was painting pictures with functions and had a far greater understanding of the domain than I’d wager anyone who thinks graphing calculations are for finding roots of polynomials could imagine.
This is nonsense. Kids are not expected to look at polynomial equations and be able to deduce the shape of the graph without a graphing calculator. Besides, it is expected that a student can use a graphing calculator to be able to numerically solve for a root of arbitrary polynomial equation.
> This is nonsense. Kids are not expected to look at polynomial equations and be able to deduce the shape of the graph without a graphing calculator
It is not nonsense. I'll draft an example.
Any second degree polynomial is a parabola that is either pointing up (positive a term), or down (negative a term). That term is an indication of how curved it is.
-b/2a is the X coordinate of the parabola's inflection point.
Plug that value into the equation and it'll give you the Y coordinate.
You now know the inflection point of the parabola, you know which way it points, and how steep it is, and exactly where the polynomial's roots should live (and whether or not it has any real ones!). If you remember what the squares of 0.5, 1, and 2 are, you can now connect the dots on a 'pretty good' plot.
This took yuo longer to read than it takes to do.
---
Similar transformations can be applied to sine waves, root functions, exponentials, logarithms, and reciprocals.
If you can't do this, or don't understand how to do this, you have not learned and understood the material. If all you've learnt is how to plug the formula into a magic $160 box to look at the pretty picture, and how to ask it to solve for roots, you and your teachers have wasted your time. The point of all this isn't looking at plots, the point is understanding how you can manipulate these equations, and what these manipulations do to them. This should all be drilled to the point of being intuitive.
Anything so complicated that basic algebraic manipulations won't get you the rough shape in seconds of work... Is more complicated than a high schooler is taught to solve.
Ironically builtin smartphone calculators are really bad, and one of the best ones you can download might be Graph 89 (a TI-89 emulator).
Rant/Aside: Smartphones (or at least Android) are just generally really bad at being... smart, especially out of the box. No dictionary? No thesaurus? To say nothing of built-in encyclopedia (e.g. Wikipedia). Calculator worse than the $1 scientific ones? It's astounding how obvious it is that they're meant to dumb people down and just sell you crap when you look at the complete absence of basic functionality anyone from 50+ years ago might expect them to have.
>kids have smartphones, what's the point of a graphing calculator?
Many tests will not allow you to use a smartphone. My son couldn't even use the school issued chromebook on his PSAT, he had to get a loaner Windows laptop or use an approved hard calculator.
I'm with you. Some open source app is all they need.
However to answer your question: phone rules in classrooms vary enormously and the dedicated calculator is faster to interface when you're drilling problems in a homework setting
I finished highschool in the (gasp) 20th century so the modern classroom is certainly something I've had to learn
> Show me a highschool math problem you can't do on a $12 Casio scientific like the classic FX-300MS
There isn't one.
The TI-83 is just a $160 tax on every high school student. There is precisely zero use in a graphing calculator before university.
If you ever need a plot of literally any function you'd be plotting in high school, you should be able to do a very quick, very rough approximation by hand. If you can't, you haven't learned the material.
Graduated high school in 1984, I don't think graphing calculators existed then but if they did nobody had them. Standard "scientific" calculators were what I used for all my high school and university math.
Ti really needs to stop with the artificial product differentiation. There's no reason 15 years after the Nspire CX CAS came out that everyone of their calculators can't do CAS.
Wow, they used to be allowed back when I was in high school. It came in super clutch for SAT but much more importantly AP. Our school mandated the original CS CAS and drilled us on how to use it effectively and I got good mileage out of it through high school testing and college.
I lost it at some point and got the version 2 and I would occasionally use it for work. I wish it had USB-C because who has a mini-B cable for charging these days
As someone who also menu-3-1'd their way through the SAT, I'm surprised it was ever allowed. Super useful outside of school but knowing that a good portion of my classmates using Ti-84s were doing the same problems on paper felt rather unfair.
CollegeBoard only seemed to realize recently, the ban on CAS calculators on the SAT, PSAT, and AP exams came last September if I remember correctly, maybe August or October
Ah yes, I had a 89 Titanium (bought with the funds from a math prize) that felt like sanctioned cheating for College Board exams. The year I took the AP physics test, there was a surreally difficult integral or differential equation that I owed completely to the calculator. I never did as well in math competitions since getting that thing, but no regrets.
They let you write python programs as long as it’s from memory though. I wonder what the code golf looks like for a rudimentary python CAS. If you could evaluate the equation without needing to parse it, I bet you could get a lot of mileage out of a black box gradient decent routine. The analog circuit solver I wrote for my nSpire (without CAS) was ~11kB. https://github.com/deckar01/pylacc
Advanced calculators are in an unusual space with external constraints on it. Some of the features or differentiation they add serves the constraint of "if you don't, we won't let students use it in the classroom".
When a calculator is used in a classroom, there's a concern about people using the calculator to replace the skill that's being taught. So, for instance, there's space for a calculator with no CAS, for a class that's trying to teach you to do algebra. That is in some ways easier than "don't use this function of the calculator".
Yeah there's not really a purpose for advanced calculators anymore (apart from the niche market of people who just enjoy using them). Calculators are basically only a thing now to make it harder to cheat on exams. If you don't have that constraint, you might as well use Wolfram or Matlab or whatever.
Or, here's a wild idea - exam problems should be structured such that they do not require any advanced calculator.
Math problems should not require any calculator. Physics problems should require a scientific calculator. Overcomplicating the arithmetic shouldn't be the point.
My linear algebra class used F_2 as our field probably half the time that it was specified. Realistically almost any course probably doesn't need calculators at all (or they could at least be kept for homework). If you're not teaching arithmetic, you keep the arithmetic simple. If you're not teaching algebra, you keep the algebra simple. etc.
It is not really classroom. It is more so setting testing standard that matches the standardised testing that schooling aims for. This ofc then extends to testing in classroom tests as that is best way to prepare students.
Not that any of this matter anymore as it can be entirely replaced with LLMs in near future.
I don't think it's been about costs or CPU for at least 20 years, but isn't it more that for kids to learn to do math, it's better not to have CAS always at hand? So that's why there are some in the lineup without it.
It's about ensuring "academic honesty" on exams. Also, it's nice to have buttons rather than a touchscreen. Also, there is something to be said about using a device with a different form-factor than the one on which a student also scrolls TikTok/IG and distracts themselves otherwise.
I find it interesting that TI still seems to use custom ASIC chips for their calculators.
Any MCU out of their portfolio should be fully capable of driving the display, reading the keyboard. And the math should be lightweight for even the smallest processors nowadays.
Nostalgia aside... these things aren't really that great and are overpriced for what they are. TI sustains itself on basically extorting high schools and colleges to use that.. because most of the teachers just used these.
I'm not sure such a device really improved any understanding of the underlying mathematics that I was taught. In fact, in more advanced mathematics these machines can't even keep up.
I'm surprised to see "Approved for Exams" featured so prominently, as handheld calculators for lots of standardized exams are being phased out.
All of the exams listed are either already offered in a computerized format or in a transition phase, with the PSAT, SAT, APs, and ACT all already offering Desmos in their testing apps.
I love handheld calculators, but, especially in a time-sensitive environment, it's hard to beat a large screen and full keyboard.
"Approved for Exams" make more sense when you take into account the history of the Ti family of calculators.
Why are they still able to sell what is effectively a 30 year old computer for as much or more today than when it came out? Because they managed to get the family informally standardized as "The calculator every teacher in America understands well enough to manage students who use it. Therefore pretty much everything else that could be as or more advanced is effect banned."
It was an amazing piece of kit when it first came out. No doubt you could make something 100x better and 10x cheaper today if someone really tried. But, they would fail commercially because you can't design-in 30 years of legacy in the US school system.
tests like SAT, ACT, and some AP exams are using Desmos, yes
however:
- this means you have to fiddle with a popover window and can't always see the full problem (especially when the reference sheet is also online)
- you have less muscle memory and often take longer
- harder to multitask (you use paper anyways, and the paper to calculator friction is lower than the paper to trackpad friction
- trackpads on school computers are usually worse, which compounds the problem
- some specific functions just don't exist
essentially using Desmos is like using a physical mouse/trackpad, while using your calculator is like using VIM motions and keyboard shortcuts with a concave split keyboard. it's technically more intuitive and can help in certain scenarios, but it's useful to have both.
this sounds trivial, but it's not, especially on tests where you have about or less than a minute per question
ideally you have both a handheld calculator and Desmos though
Ideally the tests would not require external tools at all. There's nothing that needs to be tested in the context of a high school course that can't done with pencil and paper.
I am from an xUSSR country. And started school shortly after the dissolution. Not only calculators were forbidden in exams, they were forbidden in classes. So calculators in school seems so strange to me.
In high school I had the TI-89 Titanium. Like everyone here, I got into programming it using some USB adapter I could attach to my iMac G5 and the TI Connect app[0].
One day, vexed by something, I vented my frustration by composing a profanity-laced rant into the Feedback window of the TI Connect app. (I don't recall the proximate cause, but I remember complaining that the product itself, which is still $110 today, is a total ripoff.)
I was certainly surprised when the (sole?) TI Connect developer responded by e-mail taking umbrage at my complaints.
I don't know either what they meant, but for comparison NumWorks calculators are clocked at 216 MHz (100 MHz for the older models, and 550 MHz for some of the latest ones, but not everywhere), so it doesn't look that much out of the ordinary, maybe a little underpowered from my experience with the first NumWorks but eh idk it's a calculator and unlike the first NumWorks they don't try to do CAS.
Thanks for clarifying. I think this is an ARM and a break from a history of Z80 and Z80 adjacent CPUs. I do get the impression TI have done a good (financial) job milking these products whilst under investing in real product innovation.
> The keypad layout removes clutter and makes commands and shortcuts easier to see, so you can work faster with fewer steps.
I don't see it. I compared a screenshot of one of these to a older T-84, and it looks like they have same number of buttons, and the buttons are just as cluttered (except the EVO has secondary labels on the keycaps instead of the case).
That's a good thing, since one of the best things about calculators is they typically have a ton of buttons for quick access to a lot of functions.
On my favorite designs ever? The first TI-Nspire "battleship" keyboard. Mini alpha-symbol keys in the corners of actual keys. It looked so annoying, but my muscle memory got very good at it.
The comments on this are fascinating. Although, I was waiting for someone to chime in with "HP is better cuz RPN."
2 dinners out for a family of four would cover the cost of this calculator. If my kid's school required this for math, I wouldn't bat an eye at purchasing one.
I needed a Ti-83 for school in 1996-1998. If you couldn't afford one, the school would loan you one for the semester. Band instruments were the same way.
I have 2 Swiss Micros and a pile of sapphire-chip designed-in-Corvallis USA-made HPs. The DM41x is pure joy in the hand. But I still texted the pink TI-84 EVO to my 16-year-old daughter because she doesn't like my stodgy TI-84 CE Plus (which I love).
I bought a DM42n last year. I didn't need it. I don't use it so often that I can justify its purchase. Still, wow, I do so enjoy working with it. It's one of those tools that just feels good to use.
I loved my TI-84+ SE and wish I still had it (had all sorts of custom programs on it but it got lost or stolen before I finished high school).
That said, I find it really hard to believe that they can't provide better specs and feature set for the cost. User-available memory of 3.5MB is incredibly low, especially with Python support. These could be really cool handheld computers if TI put more effort into their devices that already have a massive install base.
Currently, most of their popularity in my experience is "lock in" effect from teachers who are familiar with TI calculators and lab / curriculum materials that are specifically built around teaching through TI calculators. At this rate they're charging a lot and resting on their near monopoly status in education, which I'm sure is very profitable for TI.
There used to be a great app called WabbitEmu that emulated these devices on Android. I think they got a cease and desist but it was pretty neat to have back in the day
I was introduced to the 83 Plus and it was simply the most mindblowing device at the time. We were given a sheet to share with our parents on why it was an important device to own/borrow. Me and several friends would trade apps through the TI-Link cable, and we would play games, write software for it and there was even a popularity rank in school about whose program was installed on more calculators.
For a lot of people it introduced them to TI-Basic which was quite capable, and for others you could get into Assembly which allowed for more powerful applications. There were 2 parts of the memory, BASIC programs were in regular memory that could be easily erased, and another part which was Flash Apps.
I later upgraded to the 89 which had a better CPU, screen resolution and processing power and it was phenomenal in helping me understand every single math class, including EE/EECS. It made me sad to see them banned in exams, because having a 83+/89/any calculator was in no way helpful in any of the exams I took, but it was more of a "control the students" thing in college. The Math department determined that because they couldn't prove that people were not using the internet/portable PC's in their calculators, that they could not guarantee the fairness of it all.
Weird argument to make knowing that a 20 year old student was engineering a full internet capable PC into a calculator at the time would have been the envy of the world (and every engineering program).
This all depends on the quality of education and not simply handing out problems that require rote memorization of the methods to solve an equation and instead derive or figure out the equation yourself after understanding the problem after which you're free to use the calculator to "plug and chug".
What calculators are you guys using that aren't in academia anymore and don't need the "exam approved" limitations?
Or are we all just using software on our computers now.
That would be sad.
(I've had a Casio fx-991EX on my desk for a few years, that replaced a broken Casio fx-991ES. Though designed for academia, its operation is burned into my brain at this point.)
I use emu48 on my phone emulating the HP-50g, which was almost exactly the same size as the phone so my muscle memory somewhat carries over (minus the tactile feedback of a real keyboard). I still have the physical calculator on my desk at home, with no batteries in it so it's only usable within reach of its USB cable.
Anything that goes beyond what that calculator's UI can reasonably handle is going to end up in a Jupyter notebook or something like that.
Similarly, I still have my HP-42s but I usually use Free42[0] on my phone and tablet. They also have it for desktops. It's great if you like RPN calculators. Or if anyone wants to learn about them, you can use that program and follow along with the original manual(s)[1]. It's nice to be able to handle the order of operations without parentheses.
I collect HP calculators: I have an HP 12C, an HP 15C Collector's Edition (there are a few of them left still for sale), an HP 32Sii, and an HP 48SX. I sometimes use them, but whenever I'm in front of a computer (which is almost all the time), I find myself using the Unix dc command.
Handheld calculators are nice, but outside of exam settings, I could use a smartphone or a computer, though calculators are nice when I want to work distraction-free through something that requires performing calculations. I believe this is why HP largely exited the calculator market: HP's target market was professionals, and cheap computers and smartphones killed the calculator market for them, similar to how electronic calculators killed the slide rule. Texas Instruments, however, is still in the calculator business, largely due to their successful courting of American middle and high schools, as well as ETS and other testing agencies, beginning in the 1990s. I don't know the situation in Japan regarding calculator usage, but I see Casio scientific and graphing calculators proudly displayed at electronics stores such as Yodobashi Camera and Bic Camera.
HP-35 (1972, first scientific, first in space) - in leather case
TI-30 (1976, first low-cost scientific)
HP-12C (1981, financial, c. 2000 remanufacture)
HP-15C (1982, advanced scientific) - in leather slipcase
HP-16C (1982, computer programming) - in leather slipcase with manual
TI-30 SLR (1982, TI’s first solar-powered scientific)
HP-17B II (1990, financial)
TI-85 (1992, TI’s first with link port)
TI-82 (1993)
TI-92 (1995, TI’s first with computer algebra system)
I use the HP-16C pretty regularly when I'm working on network protocol programming. I have good apps that do it, but there's something about having the calculator right in front of my keyboard rest and turning to it that I like more. In a pinch or outside the house I'll use JPRN instead.
honestly, I think it makes no sense to spend more than 30$ on a calculator if it can't do symbolic math.
The way you input things like division, integrals, matrix, etc. on newer calculators like the nspire is far superior than the older calculators (eg. ti-84, ti-89, etc.). They look like how you write them on a blackboard instead of relying on purely parentheses or "," and ";" to separate parameters. It's like going from Excel to Mathcad
> What calculators are you guys using that aren't in academia anymore and don't need the "exam approved" limitations?
I still have my TI-85, but I essentially haven't used it since I left college. For 99% of what I need, I use either Python, or what's built into Firefox (e.g. unit conversion), or DDG. For that last 1% (e.g. full CAS functionality), I tend to grab whatever web-based non-AI tool is handy.
The most common way for me to do basic arithmetic is by opening up a Python shell and using it as a calculator. This is what I typically do when I go through my finances every few months and calculate prices for things.
If I’m reaching for calculator, I’m reaching for my phone.
At that point I’m either using the stock iOS calculator or iHP48, HP48 clone.
It mostly depends on which page of apps I’m on and which is closest.
I like the unit conversion on the iOS calculator, easier to use for trivial calcs than the HP.
Biggest gripe on iOS is a single memory. On the HP I’m mostly hooked on the infinite stack, and that’s why I use it over the HP-42 clone app I have as well.
I used to keep my old TI-82 (or was it -84?) from high school and a simpler sturdy solar-powered calculator near my desk, but I realized I always just used either my computer (IRB in the terminal usually) or Apple's calculator app on my phone and never ever touched my physical calculators. So they've now been put in storage.
I still use my TI-89 from high school, but I'm interested to find if there are any open hardware/firmware calculator projects with basic engineering tools and a CAS.
I used to doodle and make pixel art on my TI 84+ in high school. I'd spend entire classes just clicking left, right, up, down, and enter to move and toggle individual pixels with a simple program I'd written.
https://timstr.website/artwork/ti84plus.html
It's a beautiful device so much that hacker inside me wants to poke into what CPU they have and design a similar one in Verilog myself then put it on FPGA with similar display and it's driver then a 3D printed case and keys too.
I'll take my father's HP 49g to my grave.
but if TI wanted to flirt with me, all it would take is a setting to enable Reverse Polish Notation. (I did check the features, and no mention).
Why do you need an online calculator subscription? I can kind of get why you want a physical calculator, especially for a school environment, but why would you want a calculator online when you can just use... the rest of the web?
This has me pining for a future professional class CAS 3d graphing calculator.
I'm thinking something that could be a major upgrade in spirit to the long-in-the-tooth (released a decade ago) Casio FX-CG500.
Could use the soon to be released ARM C-1 Nano and Pro cores in an SoC with stacked 2GB LPDDR4, USB-C charging to a large battery, high-res transflective LCD...
I didn't have a calculator until my senior year of highschool. But since we weren't alliwed to use them in tests, I didn't feel like I was missing anything.
As an engineering student at CMU, I had an HP 15c like everyone else. A few years back when I found out they are coveted, I sold mine on ebay. I have an emulator on my phone.
I assume that calculators will continue to evolve and that my grandchildren will have a Propædeutic Enchiridion.
My ti-82/83 got me into programming because I hated math so much that I taught myself to code an app that would help walk me through how to do various problems. I got in trouble but it was worth it.
Also, drug wars, x wing vs tie fighter, and all sorts of other awesome games were definitely the fun thing to do with these.
I still have my TI-83 plus. It's been with me for 25 years now! I've always kept it on my desk, despite the fact that I engraved 'KoЯn' on cover when I was 13 or 14.
I learned to program on a TI-83 and later bought a TI-84+ with the cable that allowed me to transfer my apps and games between my device and other students devices. I have fond memories of hand typing into a TI-83 BASIC for hours using code I found online at the local library - games like Drug Wars and other similar choose this or that console based games. I would later get a USB cable that allowed me to download apps and games onto my device. Good times. Decades later and I'm still programming.
As someone who built a custom serial cable (not my idea, greetz to the original designer) to load assembly programs on TI-85s for all my friends, the “approved for exams” shit is so funny
The $0.03 LED, $0.04 diffuser panel and the extra 3 cents for manufacturing keys with transparency will eat into their 93% profit margin. Can't have that. The children will just have to use a desk light.
A TI-83 was about $100 in the year 2000, and it doesn't look like it's that much cheaper today. I would've expected Texas Instruments to try gouging their very captive market.
But you can't divorce that from computing technology in general. A TI-83 used a z80 in 2000 and was priced at 1990's z80 rates, it was already gouging even back then! Now 26 years later the TI-84 uses an ez80 (or something something similar), which was introduced in 2001.
TI has always gouged their captive market. It is just increasingly ridiculous when those students also have smartphones.
FWIW I think these graphing calculators are quite good for 2026 students! It is nice to have a computer which is actually comprehensible. They just need to be more like $50. $160 is just evil.
Shrug. The SAT and ACT don't let you use an iPhone on their exams. $160 is what the market will bear. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, it just is, and perhaps there's a market for a much cheaper competitor to beat TI here.
You can use any calculator that meets the restrictions for things like the SAT.
However.
The entire year, your textbooks, your teacher, your in-class practice, was walking you through the specific commands you need to select to actually do the things, like graphing and solving.
If little Timmy is unable to read the manual about how to do math he doesn't yet know with whatever his specific calculator is, he is at a severe disadvantage, and the teacher basically cannot help him.
A friend in high school bucked the trend and used a casio in our TI based education, and did just fine for himself, but he was apparently a smart kid.
You previously acknowledged it's a "very captive market" that you "would've expected Texas Instruments to try gouging" :) "$160 is what the very captive market will bear until the state-sanctioned gouging backfires" is a less compelling argument.
"Shrug" is kind of gross. Seems like you're being reflexively cynical.
Edit: to be clear the problem here is really local school boards being antidemocratic and unaccountable, not TI being greedy.
156MHz and 3,5MB user memory... Why do I feel like that is a joke these days.. I think some ESP32s are faster and have more memory, but not sure if they are fully comparable...
I don't have a prime, but agreed on 48gx + dm42n without a doubt.
I'd add the 50g as another contender, doesn't depend so much on external memory cards (which have the tendency to fail) and is fairly aligned with the 48/49 line.
How is the battery life? Rechargeable sure is nice, but the older models lasted forever on 4 AAAs (at least my TI-83). That's one aspect that would justify the low processing power for today's standards for portable computing devices.
I personally think this is stupid (e.g., the new interface for selecting functions). The interface on original 84 was better. I still have mine from 15 years ago. I still use it.
"Built to be a reliable learning tool, not a distraction"
They clearly haven't met a classroom of high school kids. Then again... I didn't have access to the internet in my pocket when I was in high school so....
I have no idea how on earth a scientific calculator costs almost as much as a cheap android phone. Do they use oled and snapdragon soc these days?
Back in my school days a 20$ Casio seems more than enough.
There is something impressive about a product line that can remain culturally relevant for this long, even if part of that durability comes from a very protected niche.
3.5 MB is pretty generous, actually! Some older TI-84 models had MicroPython running on a secondary ATSAMD21 processor with 32 KB of RAM - that was effectively unusable.
I don't get it. Who is buying these calculators nowadays? It's expensive and any plot it can generate is 1 prompt away from the AI that students are already using. Also why is there a calculator license? what even is that?
Genuine question, who uses these in practice? In my experience, calculators beyond the basic were always banned in high school and college, cause everyone's so afraid people might store something into them, and afterwards it's just matlab and python. It's not like laptops aren't a thing that everyone has on hand.
Electronics engineer here. I use my HP Prime G2 daily in the lab for basic things as well as quickly calculating complicated stuff, since you can pretty much program it to do whatever you want.
You might say why not use Python or Matlab?! It‘s true that you don‘t need a small handheld device to do engineering calculations where there is a ton of other much stronger and free options out there. But the thing is, a calculator is a pure dedication to one thing. You turn it on, you do your calculation, get the answer and move on. It gets out of your way. Plus it is a better feeling to type stuff using the dedicated buttons in a calculator than using a keyboard.
IIRC You don’t use them in the dumb kids class much, you use them a fair amount in the sort of smart class, and you don’t use them much in the actually smart class.
These have been standard equipment (that you buy, or the school loans out) in middle-class US high school math since the 90's (and gone basically unchanged since then). The math books even have content tailored to particular models so that you'll have to buy them instead of alternatives from other vendors.
Poor? In what sense? I graduated a few years ago (in Europe) and I think I could’ve gone through my entire education without owning one. Math, for me, went from nice numbers to ugly numbers that you had to do by hand (because that was the point), then to just letters and squiggles.
At no point was there a need to work with hard numbers or to learn to work with a physical calculator (I haven’t seen one in the wild in years).
Sure calculators were allowed in some cases, the "scientific" kind, not the graphing kind.
But yes I would agree. So much time spent making sure people don't learn to use the tools they'll always have on hand. Programming exams on paper and that kind of inane bullshit.
I do have fond memories of my TI-82 (we couldn't afford the fancier 84 or 89). I wonder, though, after all these years did Texas Instruments corner the market and obtain an monopoly on allowed calculators for proctored tests or ... because it sure is a shame there's not competition here driving the cost of these things down and the features way up.
TI calculators peaked with TI-89/92/v200. Functionality, low latency UX, long battery life. These are still readily available in the second hand market, at very reasonable pricing (thanks to them selling well back then).
Unfortunately, ever since, they seem to have decided to imitate smartphones and focus on making restricted devices for exam taking, rather than tools to empower the user.
The Python inclusion is fascinating to me. I, like many other kids in the US, did a lot of calculator programming with the TI-84 back in school. It definitely taught me the basics in a way that made my CS classes much easier. I'm jealous of the kids who now get to make that journey with Python instead of TI-Basic.
Is there any information on exactly what kind of processor is inside this thing? Since running python I'm thinking it's actually a low end mobile processor.
Looking at the price of this and other calculators, I wonder if there's a market for "dumb calculators" analogous to dumb terminals: a device with the calculator form factor, keyboard, and display, but where the actual computation happens on a paired computer/phone or a cloud endpoint over WiFi/Bluetooth.
The cost of these devices isn't the computation, and if anything more connectivity would probably make these more expensive and harder to use (many "smart" devices in classrooms have networking issues and if even one of them can't connect, it hurts the ability to run a lesson). I think standalone computation abilities are pretty important, and connectivity can be a downside for preventing cheating in standardized exams etc.
I think those were aimed at different market segments. And that would be engineers, professionals and working academics that is not students.
Generally limitations in education on what was allowed led to more limited feature sets. Where as full feature set that could be upsold with qwerty keyboard was aimed for different users.
My TI-85 story. While I was in prison, around 1996 or 1997, I found out a friend had a TI-85 calculator. I realized it was programmable, so I borrowed it over the weekend and wrote a program to track his stock portfolio. It was the first time I had programmed anything in 2 or 3 years.
Then I learned that the US Bureau of Prisons had a rule against any calculator (or device) that was "programmable". So I programmed the TI-85 so its startup screen read, "TI-85 NON-PROGRAMMABLE CALCULATOR". Problem solved.
You're a hero of mine so here is my story.
Me in math class in 1996 - I had a TI-82 things are programmable so I have no formal education, my parents are illiterate, and taught myself to program, and I begged them to buy me one.
I spent time learning how to code on it, writing from scratch, the game Spyhunter.
I couldn't figure out how to draw with lines or pixels so I used ASCII or text.
I presented this to my teacher who told me "these aren't for games". I was crushed.
The fact that you made a game on a device that "wasn't for games" is even cooler.
Seems like everyone has such a story about a teacher. „No you can’t read more advanced books because the current ones bore you“ etc etc
What is the matter with these people.
rigidity
Personally betting on the "crab bucket" mentality.
What a shit teacher: "No, don't be creative and learn. Do only as you're told."
Would you be open for an online coffee sometime? Your life sounds wild.
You sir are the hardest person on HN
Perhaps this is a foolish question: how did your friend actually use the tracker? Did he input the prices from the newspapers or TV news?
I'm not sure how much he actually used it after I wrote it for him, to be honest! But we did have access to daily newspapers, and some of us got weekly stock charts called "Daily Charts" by Investor's Business Daily (all paper, of course). Some of us were into trading stocks (this was during the Internet boom 1995-2000). Another weird skill I learned that is still useful to this day.
How long were you locked up in the clink for? Did you get any access to computers there? How did your time there affect you or change how you think? Thanks for sharing
I served 60 months of the 70 month sentence. I had a computer restriction, so I couldn't be around a computer.
Since I wasn't able to use computers or the Internet for that time, I did/read/learned a lot of things I wouldn't have otherwise learned. Learned how to make hooch (prison wine), how the law works and how to maneuver the court system (useful for both civil and criminal cases), got more fluent in French by speaking with some native French speakers from Benin, learned how to work out & lift weights (which I still do), and learned the value of freedom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lamprecht
> First person banned from the Internet
Legend.
Indeed.
70 months, or 5.83 years
I feel like there’s a blog post in here somewhere…!
I should do an AMA at some point. There was a pseudo-AMA on reddit a while back: https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/1z0yx7/first_person...
They had TI-85's in late '90s? I remember there only being TI-83s.
They did! The TI-89 is how I aced the AP Math exam.
The TI-92 had recently come out, and it had a QWERTY keyboard and could solve symbolic calculus problems like "find the derivative of 2x^3". This was a problem for the AP exam, since you could just type in the problem and get the answer. They fixed this by banning calculators with QWERTY keyboards. That's just about exactly when the TI-89 came out, which also did symbolic calculus but did not have a QWERTY keyboard, and so it was totally allowed on the exam. Boom, 5/5 exam score for Jorji.
Got the 89 first year it came out, loaded a periodic table on it and used it on my high school chemistry exam. Teachers had no clue back then
The -85 was released in 1992, iirc it's TI's second graphing calculator. The -83 is a later model.
I was told that one of the designers graduated high-school in '81 and college in '85, so the HS calculator was an 81 and the college calculator was an 85.
The order was:
TI-81 (1990)
TI-85 (1992)
TI-82 (1993)
TI-80 (1995)
TI-92 (1995)
TI-83 (1996)
TI-86 (1996)
TI-73 (1998)
TI-83 Plus (1999)
TI-89 (1998)
TI-92 Plus (1998)
TI-83 Plus Silver Edition (2001)
TI-84 Plus (2004)
TI-84 Plus Silver Edition (2004)
Anyone here have an idea why the models jumped around like that? Like why'd the 82 come out after the 85, or the 83 after the 92?
They had different models with different capabilities. As they made minor style changes, they bumped the numbers slightly. The 81–82–83–84 were basically the same concept, as were the 85–86. The 89 and 92 were higher-end models. The 80 and 73 are simpler models intended for middle school.
All of them are basically a multi-generational scam perpetrated against the hapless parents of American high school students who were told that they needed to buy overpriced anachronistic calculators for their kids to succeed in school. In my opinion the calculators have overall caused more pedagogical harm than benefit; the students would be better served by some combination of (a) problems that can be solved without the tedious but trivial numerical calculations these calculators support, or (b) are solved using a real programming language. If someone really wants to assign simple numerical problems, give the kids slide rules.
Calculators of this type used to make sense for an engineer doing work in the field somewhere, but make no sense in the context of a classroom.
The scam doesn’t just work in the US. In The Netherlands most secondary school students had, and I think still have, to buy these. I imagine in other countries too.
There is an interesting side effect from having always used TI calculators. They use a dot as the decimal separator, not a comma like we do here. There is usually some option to switch, but the hardware button obviously stays the same, so I’ve always been taught to just make that switch in my head, and it has become the natural thing for me to do. I see 1,000.50 on a screen I write down 1.000,50. When I use software that uses a comma as the decimal separator, I get annoyed and it takes some mental effort to enter the right values.
Huh. I have only good memories of this calculator. Would buy for my kids in a heartbeat. The fact that it barely changed is a feature to me. I know exactly what they’d be getting.
> scam
… that continues no matter what. I gave my kid my 89 from the late 90s—I was happy to avoid the TI student tax. Then a year or two back, the college board banned the 89 from certain tests/classes and so I had to cough up for an 84. Even if you take care of your stuff, treat it well to pass on to your kids, the Man finds a way to extract their cut.
I think you can flash a TI83 Plus ROM to a TI73 by using an exploit? One exploit was that flashing an OS writes all the ROM, then checks the signature afterwards, then erases it if it fails. Pull batteries at the correct time and...
One other factor that others haven't yet covered is that the different lines had different capabilities, e.g. the T-89 had Computer Algebra System symbolic manipulation meaning it could pretty much solve many types of math problems on its own, so it wasn't generally allowed in school. And then the Ti-85/86 was a step down, but had matrix support that the lower models lacked, so it was necessary for some specific types of classes.
My favorite was always the TI-85/86 line. I loved those F1-F5 buttons right beneath the screen, which made the interface overall better to navigate. The first programming I ever did was on one of those (either the 85 or 82, can't exactly remember at this point which I owned first). And, the only thing of note I ever had stolen from me was a TI-82, taken out of my unattended backpack by another student during gym class :( (And I had even carved my name into the back of it with a knife, so it would've been identifiable.)
They were different lines. The numbers aren't mean to be chronological; similar to how AMD released some 5000 series AM4 Ryzen chips long after they'd moved on to AM5 and 7000/9000 series.
TI83 (1996) was a successor to the TI82 (1993) which was a refresh/update of the TI81 (1990).
TI85 (1992) was the second model they made, originally intended as a higher end version of the TI81.
Similar reasoning for the rest of their line up. Different models had different features, and then those models would get incremental updates/refreshes over the years.
I wasn't part of the team or anything, so if anyone has any insight to why exactly they called it that in the first place, I'd be interested to know, but generally speaking the answer is: When they released the first one in 1990, they didn't name it under the presumption that this family of devices would be a staple educational/academic electronics device for the next 3 decades with dozen(s?) of different iterations/generations over the years.
A lot of it had to do with capability. The TI 92 was considerably more capable than the 83. The 89 had better software than the 92 but with a smaller form factor. The 92+ was the 92 with the 89 software.
The encyclopedia of TI calculators is http://www.datamath.org
Joerg Warner has been collecting them exhaustively, and peering inside for date codes and such.
If anybody here can illuminate where these names came from, I'd love to know!
That's such a fantastic story.
Love this
this made me giggle lol
About 25 years ago my parents got me a Ti84 as a surprise for Christmas and they hid it in the attic so I couldn't find it in the meantime. A few months went by and a couple days before Christmas, when it was time to wrap the presents they couldn't find it anymore. My dad went out and got a Casio something as a late minute replacement, and that was the calculator I used in high school and I never knew about this story. Then last year I found a Ti84 in my parents attic...
Was this the first time you had realized that they did, in fact, love you the entire time?
My dad got a free palm pilot m125 or something and I used a ti/HP calculator emulator on it since my parents thought buying a $99+ calculator was too expensive. fun writing apps in basic for that thing and the games for it were the best mobile ones. I did envy people with Mario and drug wars on their calculators though.
I played the heck out of some space trading game based on drug wars I think. You “flew” around between planets buying and selling cargo.
I would love to play something like that again on my phone.
Space trader?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Trader_(Palm_OS)
I played it recently on iOS via the palm web emulator
https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/
Must have been closer to 20 years, 84(+) didn't come out until 2004.
Gonna be pedantic/crotchety about this because I got into advanced math classes but it was my brother who got the 84+ (I had to settle for a 83+). Guess who's the engineer now, and who's the NEET? Your kids pay attention to what (who) you value, folks.
Genuinely not sure. Are you the brother that spited your family with a successful career or the one whose life was was doomed by a graphing calculator.
I don't remember there being much of a difference between the 83 and 84. Did you care about the amount of memory or the clock speed of the processor? Or was it more of a status thing.
weird grudge to keep for twenty years, man
Sounds like he needed all the help he could get.
ooh good catch! it was a TI-83, got confused right there (it was before 2004)
My guess : the engineer got the older model
Reason : making due with more scarcity increased independence and critical thinking.
I don't know if that was your point...
Gonna guess you are the NEET
> I got into advanced math classes but it was my brother who got the 84+ (I had to settle for a 83+)
I had a TI-85 (maybe 86), unlike the entire rest of my school who had 83s.
There was a difference: when programming in TI-Basic, variable names on a TI-83 are limited to a single character. On the 85, you can make them longer.
But that was pretty much the only difference, and it will never come up if you're using the calculator for school-related reasons.
(For calculus, I had an 89. The differences are much more significant there.)
The TI-85 also didn't have a lot of the built-in statistical functions that the TI-83 had.
I also was the one person with a TI-85 in a school of 83s. But by the time I took the statistics class I knew enough BASIC to write my own programs to replicate the functionality that was missing.
I was a self taught TI-Basic programmer and ran into the 26 variable limit on a choose-your-own-adventure style game I wrote. I ended up breaking it into 3 programs so I had enough variables. Programs could invoke other programs so I could navigate between states.
had to search that, NEET is India's National Eligibility cum Entrance Test.
No, I was too scared to ask.
NEET means "Not in Education, Employment, or Training". The stereotype is an unemployed young adult living with their parents and playing video games all day.
why are you attacking your brother lol
Every time I see a post about the TI calculators, I think about how much I dislike their interface, and it's all because I started out on a Casio.
I had a Casio that was multi color, because I thought it was cooler. Display was nice, functionality sucked.
I had a Casio because it was $10 cheaper than the TI. Man I was jealous of the "rich" kids.
Hahaha! This is great.
Somewhat related. My mom once yelled at me for losing a necklace she really liked. Then we were moving her stuff out of her house and found the necklace behind a wardrobe, wedged between it and the wall. It had been there for like 40 years, layered in dust.
On 9 July 1537, Martin Luther wrote in a letter to Wolfgang Capito about a lost golden ring: "Pro annulo aureo gratias tibi agit mea Catharina, quam vix unquam magis indignatam vidi, quam ubi sensit, cum vel furto sublatum, vel sua negligentia (quod nec mihi verisimile est, licet usque ingerenti) amissum, quod persuaseram ei, hoc donum esse felix omen et augurium ei missum, tanquam nunc certum esset, vestram Ecclesiam cum nostra suaviter concordare; id mire dolet mulieri."[1]
When Luther's house in Wittenberg was excavated about 20 years ago, a golden ring[2] was found that must have been deposited there before 1540. It is therefore quite likely that this is the ring mentioned by Luther in 1537.
[1] See WA, BR 8: no 3162 -- https://archive.org/details/werkebriefwechse08luthuoft/page/...
[2] Here is an image of the ring: https://www.zum.de/Faecher/G/BW/Landeskunde/rhein/geschichte...
Are we expected to know latin, or is this supposed to be a little homework assignment for us? Ridiculous.
Rather obviously these days one can copy/paste the Latin into google translate in mere seconds for relief ...
Google? Eeewwww!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpgTqRxaC0c
FOMO burnout is real.
You're expected to use technology to break through the language barrier
Yup, classic Martin Luther!
If my grandmother were to find out that housekeepers occasionally do actually take things, it would set us back decades.
Google Translate:
My Catherine thanks you for the golden ring, whom I have hardly ever seen more indignant than when she realized that it had been stolen or lost through her own negligence (which is not likely for me, although I still insist on it), which I had persuaded her that this gift was a happy omen and augury sent to her, as if it were now certain that your Church would agree pleasantly with ours; this grieves the woman wonderfully.
My mom once was getting ready for work and I hear a pop and hear my mom yelling. I go in and her necklace fell off the dresser; a "dust buster" wall wart was plugged in back there and it fell across the prongs, shorting it out.
This is why you always mount outlets with the grounding pin facing up!
Wow, I never knew they could be installed that way; the US standard doesn't say. Now every time I see a new outlet I'm going to check.
Or have sensible outlet design where prongs are always recessed.
This is why you have modern circuit breakers.
How does that help?
The ground pin, when "up", is higher than the hot, so in certain situations it can prevent something from shorting the hot and neutral. Code (?) or convention requires it if you have a metal faceplate, and hospitals require it. People generally like them mounted ground down because then they look like little faces. :-)
edit: Not code, just convention.
Wouldn't it short hot and ground then, and still turn the necklace into a short-lived fuse?
The more practical reason to mount ground down is that wall warts with ground pins or polarized prongs nearly universally arrange them so that they're hanging down when inserted into a ground-down plug. If the plug's flipped, the wall wart's upside down and its weight is trying to lever it out of the wall.
Yes, in that case it would short hot and ground, which is effectively the same and hot and neutral, since at the main panel hot and ground are bounded together. But if it were, say, a metal credit card or something rigid, it might just fall on the ground, or could hit the ground and neutral.
It doesn't.
... it was an ungrounded plug... Plus it was a chain, so it'd drape across all 3.
TBH, in the house I mount them ground down, but under cabinets or in the garage/shop or etc I mount it ground up.
I think ground up commonly indicates that an outlet is controlled by a switch on the wall. It's not code, but I think it's a convention
From here: https://www.cemetech.net/news/2026/4/1062/_/ti-84-evo-calcul...
> 3x Processing Power - Matching one of the speculated options, the calculator appears to use an ARM Cortex CPU, finally retiring the z80 and ez80 family of CPUs that were used in three decades of TI-83 and TI-84 Plus graphing calculators. It's running at 156MHz, compared to the 48MHz of the older calculators. It appears likely that in an unexpected break from over 30 years of TI's operating system codebase, the OS has been re-implemented with new features natively on the ARM CPU rather than using an ez80 emulator to run an updated form of the TI-84 Plus CE operating system.
It looks like TI is finally moving away from the Z80. This must have been a pretty big engineering effort on TI's part. Like the article says, up to this point all of TI's low-end graphing calculators have been Z80 based and use the same system software that has a lineage dating back to the early 1990s. They were previously so wedded to the Z80 that when they introduced Python programming to their calculators, they did so by adding an ARM microcontroller that runs MicroPython, while the main eZ80 CPU acts as a serial terminal.
Much nostalgia. The TI-83 Z80 was how I learned assembly as a teenager, so I could write better calculator games than was possible with TI Basic. Many others here had a similar experience, I’m sure. It’s been a couple decades, but I’m sure I’d still remember most of it if you put me down in front of a bunch of Z80 asm code.
One thing that I remember vividly was you had no MUL or DIV, so you have to implement them yourself with shifts, adds, subtraction, etc. This was an extremely useful learning experience
Same story here (basic was too slow for a phoenix/movable-ship-shooter game).
Do you think you could remember most of Z80 ASM? I looked at some old ASM I wrote long ago, and it's hard to follow the logic of the program, since most lines are messing around with the registers. But basics like 'ld hl,xyz' and 'jp/jnz' still make sense.
> Do you think you could remember most of Z80 ASM?
I find when you learn things at 15 they tend to stick around. (Stuff I learned last week, not so much!) Even just looking at your example, I remembered that HL is a 16 bit register and you can split it into two 8 bit registers H and L if you want. I think most of it would come back; I wrote quite a lot of it, both for the TI-83 and later for a Z80 that I bought and put on a breadboard and wired up to some RAM and EEPROM, about as bare metal as it gets.
> most lines are messing around with the registers
Isn’t that just the nature of assembly? :)
Fun memory trip. Learned assembly on those old Z80s in middle school. I had to go re-dig up SafeGuard, a program I made by reverse engineering TI's TestGuard, to stop admins from wiping your calculator memory and all your games! https://mikeknoop.com/upload/safeguard/
Does this mean uncle worm won’t run on it out of the box? A tragedy
>cemetech
>Kerm Martian
There's some names I haven't heard in a while :)
It's kind of weirdly comforting to see Kerm is still passionate about calculators after all these years, isn't it?
Real shame since cortex has a admin TrustZone processor that is licensed to special interests only. For the educational market, this "security" is a selling point. It guarantees that a student isn't running unauthorized code or "cheating" apps. It also likely allows OTA auditing of the classroom's state.
> Real shame since cortex has a admin TrustZone processor that is licensed to special interests only.
This is substantially inaccurate.
1) Not all ARM Cortex series CPUs have TrustZone. It is absent on many Cortex-M microcontrollers, for example.
2) TrustZone is an operating mode of the CPU, not an "admin processor". Depending on the part, it is often made accessible to developers. (Whether that includes third-party software developers is, of course, up to the device manufacturer.)
For more information, see:
https://developer.arm.com/documentation/100690/0200/ARM-Trus...
There’s a discussion to be had on the absolutism of technology for decisions or security, and the slow erosion of a certain intangible “discretionary” element in day-to-day life.
Any secure boot design can achieve that, you don't need TrustZone to do that
What prevents a motivated cheater from swapping out the processor entirely?
The effort.
And the cost, and the parents.
One-shotted with Claude Code. Chef kiss.
Summary of the comments in here:
* I used the programming functionality of the calculator to get around the rules
* I didn't care much for the math, but my TI calculator was my first programming experience and it's what got me to love programming
My experience is similar. We were allowed to use our TI-85s in class, but we had to go up to the teacher before the test and show him that we were running a factory reset, to prove we had nothing programmed in it to cheat.
My buddy and I had made a two player blackjack game and didn't want to have to retype it after every test. So instead we made a program that mimicked the factory reset process. You would run the program before walking up tot he front.
The only indication something was different was the three little dots in the corner indicating a programming was running, but we just covered that with our thumbs.
Ironically we never used it to cheat, only to not erase our game that we programmed!
I wonder how many of us had the exact same experience (down to those damn three little dots!)
We had to buy those calculators for highschool and it was a waste of money, felt like somebody must be paying somebody off to have thousands of students buy a device that they will certainly never have to use (and is of little educational value).
I certainly got a lot of educational value out of mine. I managed to program a fully functional Minesweeper game on mine, using the built-in programming tools - no transferring efficient binaries via cable!
But yes. 99% of what we did with them in class - when we were even allowed to use them - could have been handled by a little solar-powered calculator with basic arithmetic functions.
Programming mine in high school is how I ended up coding for the first time and led to my current career. Honestly a pretty good investment (from my parents) I'd say.
Same for me, it was also my first time ever seeing code, and I still remember it well. While getting ready for swim practice in a locker room, my friend challenged me to beat his score on a button mashing game he programmed earlier that day in school on his TI-84. My 12 year old self was in awe of his BASIC skills.
It wasn't the first time I programmed but it was first time I encountered problem solving with code.
I'm not one those (very admirable) people who build just to build, who make their own version of frogger or something. I need a problem to solve.
But making a program that would take the parameters of a physics problem and spit out all the other quantities or that formatted output the way my stats teacher wanted it was a huge timesaver and that motivated me.
Same.
I bounced off a python 2 tutorial and a C tutorial, but some random nobody's TI-BASIC tutorial that started really damn easy is how I became a Computer Scientist.
I eventually figured out python too!
I made my own game and got a little notoriety around the school for it.
This new one has python, imagine
same. My first real exposure to coding was hacking Drug Wars on my brothers old ti-89 in math class.
In my school, I was part of a group of students who hand-programmed games on TI-81 or TI-82 calculators using TI-BASIC. No cable transfers. Games included: Hangman, Missile Command, Minesweeper, and R-Type. Looking back, it was really amazingly impressive. Both what those calculators could do and how much free time we had to make them do it.
I programmed a Mandelbrot generator on my TI-81 (if I remember the model correctly) when I should have been paying attention in class. Entering the code was slow and painful - fortunately the algorithm is fairly simple. The batteries lasted forever, until one day I set the bailout to a ridiculously high value, given the limited resolution, and walked away.
We made multi-player games over the link cables in the early 1990s. We certainly learned a ton from building those. It's not clear how much the calculators added to the math and chemistry classes where we were supposed to use them.
It’s not that the calculator was more than what students need, it’s that even for what it was the TI83/84 was way overpriced. It could have been like $20 at the scale they were produced.
Same! Ticalc.org was my original GitHub haha
You could get that same educational value from programming things on a smartphone.
Current smartphones are highly optimized for content consumption a.k.a doom scrolling. Nothing serious exists for programming. On top of that, a touch keyboard and hard to reach special characters make programming on a modern smartphone a big chore. I miss the old days of smartphones that had a hardware keyboard with tactile feedback. I used to code up and maintain a PHP based dynamic website circa 2007 with a Sony Ericsson K770i and upload through a J2ME based FTP client that also had the text editor in it. If I remember it correctly it was called MobyExplorer
It's much harder to type on a TI calculator than a smartphone.
Not sure I agree. You can "blind type" on a physical keyboard, and even if it has less sophistication in the way of inputting large amounts of text (lack of auto complete, lack of fuzzy typing/auto correct), a calculator is purpose built with tons of shortcuts and contextual menus that you access from muscle memory without second guessing yourself. Right now, if I've got a mildly complicated mathematical expression to type, I'd rather do it on a last-century calculator rather than e.g. on Android's GeoGebra.
What's your favorite free programming environment for commonly used smartphones?
> What's your favorite free programming environment for commonly used smartphones?
Termux
Haven't tried these, but have seen them recommended:Acode
Termux + neovim
Termux + code-server (vscode-like, accessed through phone browser at localhost)
I like Codea for iOS, though the free version has a soft-limit at 500 lines. If a project gets bigger than 500 lines you can still run code but it'll nag you to upgrade.
I don't have a favorite. I do not feel like anyone that I am aware of has made proper investment to make a quality development app for mobile due to the low market demand. While development is better than on a calculator I think they are below my expectations.
I sort of agree.
You're paying $100 for completely antiquated hardware where its core feature is "it doesn't do much".
Pretty much any professional environment that you will need calculations will have access to a computer that can do these calculations significantly faster and better.
I thought my HP was pretty cool in high school, but pretty much the moment I graduated I stopped using it because I figured out how to use Excel and/or a programming language to do number crunchy stuff. Even for CAS stuff, I would just use Wolfram Alpha or SageMath (depending on how ambitious I'm feeling with setting stuff up).
I can't remember the last time I used a calculator outside of showing someone else how to use it.
Well I'd add to that - the real core feature is that the teacher and usually the textbook show you exactly how to use it, that's why it gets listed specifically as a course requirement.
That unfortunately is also why they can charge so much and people buy them anyway, because at best you'll be on your own to learn how to use anything else (and at worst you won't be allowed to use it at all for tests and such).
There are many professional examples outside of teaching (construction, lab based science, field work, engineering, healthcare, retail) where a calculator, not necessary a programmable one, is useful because the environment restricts the use of computers due to safety, security or practicalities.
My buddy was a general contractor. They have books of pre-printed calculators for common beam lengths. For instance, say you have a room 30 feet wide and you're putting a roof on it with a 30 degree pitch. The book will tell you exactly how long to cut the roof timbers so that they reach from the edge of the wall to the crest of the roof.
Said friend was at a site and someone had misplaced the book. He pulled out a calculator and did some basic trig to give them the lengths and told them to get back to work. He said they were looking at him like he'd just conjured a demon or something. "You can... just calculate that?" "How did you think they made the book?" "But how'd you learn to do that?" "In that math class you dropped in high school."
The interface is great for what it does though. I still use ti-83 interface with the calculator app on my phone.
Yeah I guess I should correct and say that I do use an HP 50G emulator on my iPhone cuz I like RPN.
But even still, the iPhone can do many things and is many times more capable, and you can buy a used iPhone 12 that works fine for about the same price as one of these calculators.
HP 48G(X) is the OG and what I took SAT-I and AP Calculus BC exams with. The iOS/iPadOS emu app is called i48.
Android app is called droid48
Nice.
Also, one of the major (unique?) UX innovations of the physical HP48 (c. 1990) was that it could beam apps and data to other calculators over serial IR or RS-232 with a computer. (A DIY computer interface cable could be fashioned from Sony CD-ROM analog audio cable.) Furthermore, the IR LED on the HP48G(X) was so bright, it could be software-controlled as a very long range TV universal remote, and there was a learning universal remote app that could learn codes from physical remotes by reading from the IR receiver. It would take fast and ubiquitous wireless networking (WiFi, BT, and cellular) c. 2003 before the app store concept would arrive generally for smartphones and other devices.
I learned programming on that calculator. I learned programming because of that calculator. I owe so much to that calculator.
Same.
I distinctly remember my teachers having a debate around whether or not the functions I had programmed into my calculator were "cheating". On one hand, it was a tool and notes that I had access to my peers did not. On the other hand, I had created those tools myself, and if school was supposed to train me for the real world, wouldn't I be able to use the tools I created in the real world?
Ha in my school's math department the cheating thesis won and my silly single variable CAS system (which in retrospect did nothing you couldn't do with the graph functions!) got calculator programs banned. Luckily enough my specific math teacher that year didn't care enough to enforce it and it was soon forgotten
Same. I hid custom calculators behind game levels so my teacher couldn't find them.
There are many of us, I make a living today because my dad brought home a Ti-83 Plus and I kept messing with the "PGRM" menu
Agreed, it's insane to me that in an era of Google Colab (et al) schools still require students to shell out >$100 for one of these. I'm sure there is some backroom arrangement with schools of some kind.
A lack of functionality is the point. You don't want a full CAS or Internet search results available, or many students will just take the easy route and not learn anything.
Neither teachers nor school districts have the time or resources to audit every new tool someone wants to use, or to help students figure out how to use their preferred tool to do something - find something that works and just use that
It's a weird halfway house.
I had a cheap Casio fx calculator. It got me all the way through my exams in school and university. I had Mathematica at home.
While I can see that being very good on a TI-84 would help you complete exams faster and get better marks, is that a skill that we want students to learn? Being good on a fancy calculator is essentially useless in real life. In real life people use computers not fancy calculators.
IMO it's better to either allow only basic calculators, or to allow real mathematics software.
I got an HP50g from Craigslist in high school that
- was cheaper than a TI
- had a primitive CAS system
- teachers had no idea how to put it into test mode
It carried me through AP calc BC, I would’ve gotten <4 off of my own knowledge alone
I had the same one. I thought it was pretty cool.
One perk I found is that if I kept it in RPN mode, people stopped asking to borrow my calculator, which was a valid excuse to learn how to use RPN, which is basically all I use now (and indirectly made me really love the Forth language).
Mine was a Casio fx-something. Teachers didn't like it but it didn't let me cheat and it was just the right amount of functionality to help me with math. Carried me through Pre-Cal, Trig, Calculus and Differential Equations.
That was my first graphing calculator in high school, because it was way cheaper than the equivalent TI. Like seriously 1/4 the price for "beginning of the school year" sales.
That thing was fine, and if I hadn't dropped it and broken it, I probably would have kept using it for the rest of high school. I eventually replaced it with an HP.
I had a TI-83 in high school and upgraded to a TI-89 for college circa 2002. Used the heck out of those calculators because I did all the math and physics prerequisites for an engineering degree before switching to CS. It also helped me get a B in Linear Algebra thanks to holding a cheat sheet document for the final exam. I had no trouble with the likes of Calculus 3 and differential equations but for some reason the later material in linear algebra didn't click with me.
TI-86 is the one in my case. We had to buy it in high school, and I used it so much in high school and in university after (I still have it in a box), that it's the only calculator I've since used. I absolutely have to have a TI emulator on my phone, and have paid for multiple ones along the years.
I use my emulated TI-86 every other day, and prefer it to any other UI I've seen on calculators on phones.
When I have a laptop available, I of course use excel or wolfram alpha for anything demanding, but when on the go, I like my emulated TI-86.
30 years ago, we had the option of the TI-82 Or (83?) and the 85. A bunch of the kids with the 85 were playing Tetris and some were writing little programs. I got the cheaper 82/83, and I don't actually remember using it for anything, even once, even though I did the IB track (stats, trig, algebra, calculus, etc).
I was in the not-TI-85 club for a while. I think I had the TI-84? You could still write programs but your variable names could only be one letter. When I upgraded to a TI-85 and got Tetris a friend who had the not-TI-85 asked if his could play Tetris. I checked out the Tetris code and saw there were less than 26 variables, so I figured it could be done. I spent several English class periods porting the TI-85 Tetris code to the not-TI-85 and I got it to work. All the not-TI-85 owners loved me, lol!
How is that possible?
I wouldn’t have been able to function without it in school (20 years ago). But we also didn’t have iPhones.
Back in the mid-90's we had a TI version of sneakernet where you would copy programs from one student on to your TI-85 via a link cable; this is how I got Tetris back in the day. I assume OP did the same.
Was it that only the 85 could connect to a com port, but then you could connect the 85 to the 82/83? I seem to remember pleading with the one kid with an 85 (who didn't even care about games).
The 82 also had a com port
I don't remember if you could connect an 82 to an 85, but I do remember you could connect it to a PC as well over serial
I chopped my TI-83 link cable in half and wired it to the parallel port, like this: http://www1.inf.tu-dresden.de/~aw4/ti85.html
and this: https://web.archive.org/web/19990117001444/http://www.geocit...
IIRC there was a way to connect the TI-85 to your serial port and use some Windows or DOS software to copy files onto it. (Everyone's PC still had at least one serial port on it back then).
(Edit: I am assuming you were asking how it's possible I didn't use it, not how it's possible that people were copying programs onto their calculators.)
I don't know. It's been too long. We must have done graphing on paper.
I don't remember a lot of coursework in math that required me to produce a decimal value. For example, we wanted √2 instead of 1.414.
In physics, I think we used regular calculators.
I used to be bewildered at my parents not remembering certain things from high school. But, now I'm living it :).
I used mine constantly in highschool (10 years ago).
I used mine in highschool (20 years ago) and still use one today.
Same except mine was over 30 years ago (an OG TI-85). Still on my desk, still use it almost every day for something or other.
I don't know how the TI-85 compares to the other models without looking it up, but there's a forever soft spot in my heart for mine. It got me through a comp sci degree and still works flawlessly today.
I use mine constantly in high school (now).
Same. But I agree with the parent, I always got the vibe it was a giant racket between public schools and TI. Writing code for it was probably cool back in the 80s-90s but it's so dated now.
It's wild how much curricula within high schools must differ, because my school went out of its way to teach and encourage/require its use on nearly every quiz and exam. We joked sometimes class felt more like calculator class than math class. This was Texas, too, which I hardly consider a pioneer in education. Maybe TI pride?
Now that I think about it, this could have been a strategy my high school drilled into us as a way to increase SAT scores, since TI-84s were allowed to be used there.
Texas (TI) invented the handheld calculator after all.
>We had to buy those calculators for highschool and it was a waste of money, felt like somebody must be paying somebody off to have thousands of students buy a device that they will certainly never have to use (and is of little educational value).
I suppose it depends if you took advanced math classes or not.
My high school required one for a math curriculum that was specifically designed with the idea that students would not need advanced math classes. It kids up for failure if they were hoping to move toward higher level math in college, as the fundamentals were never adequately taught. But at least they sold thousands of calculators to kids who would never use them again.
They actually started us on them in 7th or 8th grade.
$100 for something you'll use all through middle and high school and into college isn't a bad deal.
I would have preferred a proper math education. I would have paid more for that.
I actually need a TI-82 in 7/8th grade, a TI-83 in high school, then college wanted a TI-89. I was having to upgrade every few years.
Not only did we use it several times every week for 4 years, I spent 4 years writing tons of programs on it. Best $100 ever spent, thanks mom & dad.
This is probably right, but just to note that it's very much a generational thing. When I got a TI-83 (and then eventually an 89!) it was easily the most advanced handheld computing hardware I had ever been exposed to. The iPhone made sense to me, and I knew it would be huge, the day it came out because of these amazing calculators.
I know technology has moved on and all, but much nostalgic respect to these amazing calculators.
Definitely. At the very least, given the slow change in which ones are accepted, a cheap rental setup seems like the baseline that should exist... but everyone had to buy their own for my schools.
concur .. better to have a 40-buck fx82 for daily math and use Desmos for graphing, than fork out 250 to 300 for a super-duper calc they wont use.
I was in (Catholic) HS 30 years ago and we used our TI-82s extensively in AP Calc.
Probably have not touched mine since college.
Show me a highschool math problem you can't do on a $12 Casio scientific like the classic FX-300MS https://www.usaofficemachines.com/csofx300ms-fx-300ms-scient...
There's even knockoffs of it for $1: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256809744184708.html
I picked one up when the 99 cent store was shutting down. It works fine.
Look what you can get for $20: https://www.casio.com/intl/scientific-calculators/product.FX...
TI is like the Intuit of the education world. I want to love them but this is ridiculous - a N4120 celeron laptop is the same price as this new calculator - it might be a garbage laptop but it's doing a heck of a lot more for your $160 than this calculator is.
Well, the TI-83/84 are called a graphing calculators for a reason: you can plot equations and datasets with them and look at them right there[1]. Looking at graphs is huge for learning, or at least it was for me, and school isn't just about plugging things in and getting an answer (or shouldn't be, at least).
Doesn't mean it's not overpriced, but that's one reason and you can get a used TI-83/84 for like $30 or less. They pretty much never break.
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1. Okay, the Casio can QR-code-link you to a graph, but if I have internet/smartphone there are better graphing tools anyway, like Desmos.
casio can do graphs on device for under $40
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Casio-FX-9750Glll-Graphing-Calcul...
The reason you can get used ti's for $30 is because that's how much they're actually worth.
You can get a catiga if you really want for like $17: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256809054964211.html
... or you can go with TI for $160 ...
I mean a laptop running windows can use the old power toy calculator or something like speed crunch to do graphing and I'm sure Linux has countless others, with Chromebooks probably having more for free online as well, I can only assume.
If you count basic calculus as high school level, TI89's can do symbolic integration. They're usually banned on tests for that exact reason tho.
Can it do anything non-trivial? The algorithms for symbolic integration are extensive.
My Casio could do numeric differentiation and integration. I used this to double check my answers in my exams.
In fact, it still can as I still own and use it to this day.
It's quite good for what it is. Of course it will lose to Mathematica but I used mine heavily throughout physics to derive things symbolically.
International Baccalaureate math has some stats questions that require a calculator that can do stats questions. Not really possible by hand in exam conditions!
My Casio FX-260 Solar IIs [1][2] (I recently bought 3 more of them) cost me $5 CAD a piece on clearance at Walmart. No battery, a modern solar panel that works great even in dimly lit rooms, and a modern SOC with all the standard scientific calculations, scientific notation, engineering notation, significant figures, and all the basic stats calculations too (sum, mean, pop stddev, sample stddev, permutations, combinations, factorials).
It’s my favourite calculator and the one I always reach for, despite having a bunch of more complicated 2-line calculators etc. It’s just so easy to use and very fast to do anything I’d want with a calculator. If I need graphing I’ll reach for Desmos. If I need algebra I’ll use Sage. I haven’t used Sage since my undergrad, however.
[1] https://www.casio.com/content/dam/casio/product-info/locales...
[2] https://www.casio.com/ca-en/scientific-calculators/product.F...
The basic $12 Casio scientific has stats like mean, standard deviation, regression... Stats is a huge field, we're talking highschool level. I think it probably covers it
Oh that’s neat! Probably should’ve checked your link. Not sure what the advantage of the Ti-84 would be for highschool math, but the UX on NumWorks calculators is completely a game changer, especially with stats and graphing questions.
Maybe everything is possible on the Casio, but it’s so much clearer on the NumWorks (especially for eg. Physics questions, where you might want to retrieve values you calculated earlier with full precision, etc). Genuinely felt like a cheat code when I was in highschool. I showed mine to my teacher and they swapped the whole’s schools standard calculators from the Ti-84 CE to the NumWorks, which is cheaper too.
I mean sure. Unlimited precision calculation I don't think is the proper domain of the cheap desk calculator.
I mean what do these do? I think like 10 digits worth?
If you're actually doing something requiring over 10 digits of accuracy and you can reliably hit that you probably have a $10 million lab...
So honestly what are we talking about here...If it's pure mathematics this is a bad tool for that as well.
oh of course. But I meant being able to select a result or equation from 10 minutes ago in the calculator history without re-typing it!
IB questions require at least a mid-range calculator to obtain e.g. the ccdf of chisq, t, and other distributions.
In the exam, you'd also be at a disadvantage without advanced graphing.
HL or SL? (It's been a while for me, but I know I needed PDF/CDF functions... and I don't know about the optional modules/Further.)
I took Math AA HL in M25
My favorite cheap Casio is fx-115ES Plus 2nd Edition, $17
https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-115ESPLS2-Advanced-Scientifi...
Includes GCD and LCM, some of the newer ones don't have them.
If you want graphing, there is the newish fx-CG100 has a nice display, but they removed Casio basic, it now only has micro Python (way too awkward to type on a tiny keypad):
https://www.amazon.com/Casio-ClassWiz%C2%AE-Calculator-Funct...
The older ones that still have basic:
https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-9750GIII-Graphing-Calculator...
BTW, here is a review I made of many calculators, measuring keyboard efficiency: (HP-15c still the best)
https://github.com/jhallen/calculator/wiki
I agree with you on the Casio fx-115ES Plus 2nd Edition. I picked one up two years ago for $11.41. It naturally writes out equations, has a backspace and is generally excellent. I still love my HP RPN calculators, but the fx-115ES works nicely for anyone who isn't using RPN or sympy.
Also a +1 for this calculator, it's really the best scientific calculator you can buy and a steal at the price it sells at.
The contrived ones where they make you graph stuff, but that’s about it.
There is no graphing problem that you'll be asked to solve before university that can't be plotted to a 'good enough for high school' level by hand in seconds.
Four data points is sufficient to give you a 'good enough' shape and position of a second-degree polynomial. Five or six for a third-degree one. (And you barely see them, and don't learn how to algebraically solve for their roots in high school anyways, because the cubic factoring formula is a pig.)
If you can't tell what a function's plotted shape is going to be at a glance, you haven't learned the material to the degree expected of an attentive child.
Life is not all about solving problems, high school life even less so.
Personally, I found great enjoyment in coming up with more and more involved plots in the Polar and Parametric modes, where yes I would predict what a graph would look like and then go over to see it. And then go back and iterate. Etc. Until I was painting pictures with functions and had a far greater understanding of the domain than I’d wager anyone who thinks graphing calculations are for finding roots of polynomials could imagine.
You can enjoy that as much as you want without the curriculum mandating or all-but-mandating that every student buy a $160 toy.
This is nonsense. Kids are not expected to look at polynomial equations and be able to deduce the shape of the graph without a graphing calculator. Besides, it is expected that a student can use a graphing calculator to be able to numerically solve for a root of arbitrary polynomial equation.
> This is nonsense. Kids are not expected to look at polynomial equations and be able to deduce the shape of the graph without a graphing calculator
It is not nonsense. I'll draft an example.
Any second degree polynomial is a parabola that is either pointing up (positive a term), or down (negative a term). That term is an indication of how curved it is.
-b/2a is the X coordinate of the parabola's inflection point.
Plug that value into the equation and it'll give you the Y coordinate.
You now know the inflection point of the parabola, you know which way it points, and how steep it is, and exactly where the polynomial's roots should live (and whether or not it has any real ones!). If you remember what the squares of 0.5, 1, and 2 are, you can now connect the dots on a 'pretty good' plot.
This took yuo longer to read than it takes to do.
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Similar transformations can be applied to sine waves, root functions, exponentials, logarithms, and reciprocals.
If you can't do this, or don't understand how to do this, you have not learned and understood the material. If all you've learnt is how to plug the formula into a magic $160 box to look at the pretty picture, and how to ask it to solve for roots, you and your teachers have wasted your time. The point of all this isn't looking at plots, the point is understanding how you can manipulate these equations, and what these manipulations do to them. This should all be drilled to the point of being intuitive.
Anything so complicated that basic algebraic manipulations won't get you the rough shape in seconds of work... Is more complicated than a high schooler is taught to solve.
Most of those are counterfeit knockoffs and the buttons are unreliable. It's safer to buy an older, pre-VPAM variant of the 300 or 991 models.
You can turn off VPAM though, why would you not want it?
I'm personally a fan of the ti-30xs. Still cheap and a good number of features for looking at data
Generating a QR code to see the graph online is kind of cool, but also kinda dumb too.
I mean, these days kids have smartphones, what's the point of a graphing calculator?
Ironically builtin smartphone calculators are really bad, and one of the best ones you can download might be Graph 89 (a TI-89 emulator).
Rant/Aside: Smartphones (or at least Android) are just generally really bad at being... smart, especially out of the box. No dictionary? No thesaurus? To say nothing of built-in encyclopedia (e.g. Wikipedia). Calculator worse than the $1 scientific ones? It's astounding how obvious it is that they're meant to dumb people down and just sell you crap when you look at the complete absence of basic functionality anyone from 50+ years ago might expect them to have.
>kids have smartphones, what's the point of a graphing calculator?
Many tests will not allow you to use a smartphone. My son couldn't even use the school issued chromebook on his PSAT, he had to get a loaner Windows laptop or use an approved hard calculator.
I'm with you. Some open source app is all they need.
However to answer your question: phone rules in classrooms vary enormously and the dedicated calculator is faster to interface when you're drilling problems in a homework setting
I finished highschool in the (gasp) 20th century so the modern classroom is certainly something I've had to learn
> Show me a highschool math problem you can't do on a $12 Casio scientific like the classic FX-300MS
There isn't one.
The TI-83 is just a $160 tax on every high school student. There is precisely zero use in a graphing calculator before university.
If you ever need a plot of literally any function you'd be plotting in high school, you should be able to do a very quick, very rough approximation by hand. If you can't, you haven't learned the material.
Graduated high school in 1984, I don't think graphing calculators existed then but if they did nobody had them. Standard "scientific" calculators were what I used for all my high school and university math.
Conclusion from reading HN comments: very few used the calculator to actually calculate anything
Ti really needs to stop with the artificial product differentiation. There's no reason 15 years after the Nspire CX CAS came out that everyone of their calculators can't do CAS.
CAS capabilities are prohibited in the SAT: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/what-to-bring-do/calcu...
Wow, they used to be allowed back when I was in high school. It came in super clutch for SAT but much more importantly AP. Our school mandated the original CS CAS and drilled us on how to use it effectively and I got good mileage out of it through high school testing and college.
I lost it at some point and got the version 2 and I would occasionally use it for work. I wish it had USB-C because who has a mini-B cable for charging these days
As someone who also menu-3-1'd their way through the SAT, I'm surprised it was ever allowed. Super useful outside of school but knowing that a good portion of my classmates using Ti-84s were doing the same problems on paper felt rather unfair.
CollegeBoard only seemed to realize recently, the ban on CAS calculators on the SAT, PSAT, and AP exams came last September if I remember correctly, maybe August or October
I vaguely remember they were banned by a proxy that stopped working after the Ti-89 came out: no QWERTY keyboards
Originally that blocked the Ti-92, but then the Ti-89 and Nspire line had numeric keypads + CAS
Ah yes, I had a 89 Titanium (bought with the funds from a math prize) that felt like sanctioned cheating for College Board exams. The year I took the AP physics test, there was a surreally difficult integral or differential equation that I owed completely to the calculator. I never did as well in math competitions since getting that thing, but no regrets.
They let you write python programs as long as it’s from memory though. I wonder what the code golf looks like for a rudimentary python CAS. If you could evaluate the equation without needing to parse it, I bet you could get a lot of mileage out of a black box gradient decent routine. The analog circuit solver I wrote for my nSpire (without CAS) was ~11kB. https://github.com/deckar01/pylacc
Advanced calculators are in an unusual space with external constraints on it. Some of the features or differentiation they add serves the constraint of "if you don't, we won't let students use it in the classroom".
When a calculator is used in a classroom, there's a concern about people using the calculator to replace the skill that's being taught. So, for instance, there's space for a calculator with no CAS, for a class that's trying to teach you to do algebra. That is in some ways easier than "don't use this function of the calculator".
Yeah there's not really a purpose for advanced calculators anymore (apart from the niche market of people who just enjoy using them). Calculators are basically only a thing now to make it harder to cheat on exams. If you don't have that constraint, you might as well use Wolfram or Matlab or whatever.
Or, here's a wild idea - exam problems should be structured such that they do not require any advanced calculator.
Math problems should not require any calculator. Physics problems should require a scientific calculator. Overcomplicating the arithmetic shouldn't be the point.
Calculators can do a lot of things; a lot of physics is greatly improved by access to a good calculator.
My linear algebra class used F_2 as our field probably half the time that it was specified. Realistically almost any course probably doesn't need calculators at all (or they could at least be kept for homework). If you're not teaching arithmetic, you keep the arithmetic simple. If you're not teaching algebra, you keep the algebra simple. etc.
It is not really classroom. It is more so setting testing standard that matches the standardised testing that schooling aims for. This ofc then extends to testing in classroom tests as that is best way to prepare students.
Not that any of this matter anymore as it can be entirely replaced with LLMs in near future.
The reason is exam requirements - some professional certifications don’t allow CAS calculators and have other restrictions.
I don't think it's been about costs or CPU for at least 20 years, but isn't it more that for kids to learn to do math, it's better not to have CAS always at hand? So that's why there are some in the lineup without it.
It doesn't help students learn if the tool does everything for them. This isn't a tool for professionals.
Heck, you could do a decent amount with the CAS back in the TI-89.
Decent? I'm not sure the new CAS models do anything that the TI-89 didn't.
TI-89 is the GOAT!
Which is why it was notoriously banned from exams.
Honest question: Why do we need physical graphing calculators anymore? Can't this just be a phone app?
That screen resolution for one is horrible for 2026.
Mostly for students in settings that may disallow either smartphones or calculators with specific advanced features (schools, SAT exams etc)
Also I don’t know about you but these days I welcome stuff that allows me to stay away from the damn phone.
I am pretty sure I could use a TI-89 Titanium in the dark even now
It's about ensuring "academic honesty" on exams. Also, it's nice to have buttons rather than a touchscreen. Also, there is something to be said about using a device with a different form-factor than the one on which a student also scrolls TikTok/IG and distracts themselves otherwise.
You don't. Most academic uses are now replaced by desmos, which is also used on the SAT. It's free, it's fast, and it does most of what you need.
i moved my ti-89 to be a phone app, but it was much much slower to type on the soft keyboard than it is to press the actual buttons.
I find it interesting that TI still seems to use custom ASIC chips for their calculators.
Any MCU out of their portfolio should be fully capable of driving the display, reading the keyboard. And the math should be lightweight for even the smallest processors nowadays.
Nostalgia aside... these things aren't really that great and are overpriced for what they are. TI sustains itself on basically extorting high schools and colleges to use that.. because most of the teachers just used these.
I'm not sure such a device really improved any understanding of the underlying mathematics that I was taught. In fact, in more advanced mathematics these machines can't even keep up.
I'm surprised to see "Approved for Exams" featured so prominently, as handheld calculators for lots of standardized exams are being phased out.
All of the exams listed are either already offered in a computerized format or in a transition phase, with the PSAT, SAT, APs, and ACT all already offering Desmos in their testing apps.
I love handheld calculators, but, especially in a time-sensitive environment, it's hard to beat a large screen and full keyboard.
"Approved for Exams" make more sense when you take into account the history of the Ti family of calculators.
Why are they still able to sell what is effectively a 30 year old computer for as much or more today than when it came out? Because they managed to get the family informally standardized as "The calculator every teacher in America understands well enough to manage students who use it. Therefore pretty much everything else that could be as or more advanced is effect banned."
It was an amazing piece of kit when it first came out. No doubt you could make something 100x better and 10x cheaper today if someone really tried. But, they would fail commercially because you can't design-in 30 years of legacy in the US school system.
for context
tests like SAT, ACT, and some AP exams are using Desmos, yes
however:
- this means you have to fiddle with a popover window and can't always see the full problem (especially when the reference sheet is also online)
- you have less muscle memory and often take longer
- harder to multitask (you use paper anyways, and the paper to calculator friction is lower than the paper to trackpad friction
- trackpads on school computers are usually worse, which compounds the problem
- some specific functions just don't exist
essentially using Desmos is like using a physical mouse/trackpad, while using your calculator is like using VIM motions and keyboard shortcuts with a concave split keyboard. it's technically more intuitive and can help in certain scenarios, but it's useful to have both.
this sounds trivial, but it's not, especially on tests where you have about or less than a minute per question
ideally you have both a handheld calculator and Desmos though
Ideally the tests would not require external tools at all. There's nothing that needs to be tested in the context of a high school course that can't done with pencil and paper.
There are a lot of interesting problems that can be done with a calculator, though
TIL Desmos. Thanks for the interesting info, seems super cool!
I am from an xUSSR country. And started school shortly after the dissolution. Not only calculators were forbidden in exams, they were forbidden in classes. So calculators in school seems so strange to me.
In high school I had the TI-89 Titanium. Like everyone here, I got into programming it using some USB adapter I could attach to my iMac G5 and the TI Connect app[0].
One day, vexed by something, I vented my frustration by composing a profanity-laced rant into the Feedback window of the TI Connect app. (I don't recall the proximate cause, but I remember complaining that the product itself, which is still $110 today, is a total ripoff.)
I was certainly surprised when the (sole?) TI Connect developer responded by e-mail taking umbrage at my complaints.
0: https://education.ti.com/en/products/computer-software/ti-co...
Does it still use Zilog eZ80 (Z80-family, 24-bit) as the main CPU?
> Built to be a reliable learning tool, not a distraction
15 year old me in math class programming my loaned TI-82: CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!
Jokes on you, you learned to program.
> Not just an upgrade — an EVOlution
Oh no.
You’re absolutely right!
…LLM-isms are like nails on chalkboard I swear. Instant turn off the moment I read them.
Even if they’re maybe not lol, doesn’t matter my visceral reaction is negative.
That's just what standard marketing copy sounds like.
...which perhaps says a lot about the corpora that the models are trained on.
This made me double check if it wasn't someone's vibe code scam website.
156 MHz!!!!
Surprisingly high or surprisingly low?
I don't know either what they meant, but for comparison NumWorks calculators are clocked at 216 MHz (100 MHz for the older models, and 550 MHz for some of the latest ones, but not everywhere), so it doesn't look that much out of the ordinary, maybe a little underpowered from my experience with the first NumWorks but eh idk it's a calculator and unlike the first NumWorks they don't try to do CAS.
IMHO surprisingly low. Still not clear to me why they don't just port these things to ARM or similar?
Thanks for clarifying. I think this is an ARM and a break from a history of Z80 and Z80 adjacent CPUs. I do get the impression TI have done a good (financial) job milking these products whilst under investing in real product innovation.
Faster than a base-config SGI O2, with a MIPS R10000 at 150 MHz! /s
> Simplified keypad
> The keypad layout removes clutter and makes commands and shortcuts easier to see, so you can work faster with fewer steps.
I don't see it. I compared a screenshot of one of these to a older T-84, and it looks like they have same number of buttons, and the buttons are just as cluttered (except the EVO has secondary labels on the keycaps instead of the case).
That's a good thing, since one of the best things about calculators is they typically have a ton of buttons for quick access to a lot of functions.
On my favorite designs ever? The first TI-Nspire "battleship" keyboard. Mini alpha-symbol keys in the corners of actual keys. It looked so annoying, but my muscle memory got very good at it.
https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=NMAH-DOR2014-05202...
The comments on this are fascinating. Although, I was waiting for someone to chime in with "HP is better cuz RPN."
2 dinners out for a family of four would cover the cost of this calculator. If my kid's school required this for math, I wouldn't bat an eye at purchasing one.
I needed a Ti-83 for school in 1996-1998. If you couldn't afford one, the school would loan you one for the semester. Band instruments were the same way.
> I was waiting for someone to chime in with "HP is better cuz RPN."
Well, it is ;) The Swiss Micros clones are pretty awesome:
https://www.swissmicros.com/product/dm41x
I have 2 Swiss Micros and a pile of sapphire-chip designed-in-Corvallis USA-made HPs. The DM41x is pure joy in the hand. But I still texted the pink TI-84 EVO to my 16-year-old daughter because she doesn't like my stodgy TI-84 CE Plus (which I love).
Same story here. I still have the HP15C I learned assembly language on ;) None worse for the wear. They'll all come handy after the acopalypse.
I'd take a dm42n over any Ti anyday.
Those who have used various classic HP calculators in the past may be interested in this:
https://www.swissmicros.com/products
These are clones of various older calculators.
I bought a DM42n last year. I didn't need it. I don't use it so often that I can justify its purchase. Still, wow, I do so enjoy working with it. It's one of those tools that just feels good to use.
There is a certain joy in working with RPN and in using a piece of technology that was designed as a tool, not as a toy or an educational appliance.
With phone emulation, I probably need half a calculator. I have three.
That's so true. It's custom-built to do exactly one thing, as efficiently and ergonomically as possible. I love any tool like that.
I loved my TI-84+ SE and wish I still had it (had all sorts of custom programs on it but it got lost or stolen before I finished high school).
That said, I find it really hard to believe that they can't provide better specs and feature set for the cost. User-available memory of 3.5MB is incredibly low, especially with Python support. These could be really cool handheld computers if TI put more effort into their devices that already have a massive install base.
Currently, most of their popularity in my experience is "lock in" effect from teachers who are familiar with TI calculators and lab / curriculum materials that are specifically built around teaching through TI calculators. At this rate they're charging a lot and resting on their near monopoly status in education, which I'm sure is very profitable for TI.
There used to be a great app called WabbitEmu that emulated these devices on Android. I think they got a cease and desist but it was pretty neat to have back in the day
I was introduced to the 83 Plus and it was simply the most mindblowing device at the time. We were given a sheet to share with our parents on why it was an important device to own/borrow. Me and several friends would trade apps through the TI-Link cable, and we would play games, write software for it and there was even a popularity rank in school about whose program was installed on more calculators.
For a lot of people it introduced them to TI-Basic which was quite capable, and for others you could get into Assembly which allowed for more powerful applications. There were 2 parts of the memory, BASIC programs were in regular memory that could be easily erased, and another part which was Flash Apps.
I later upgraded to the 89 which had a better CPU, screen resolution and processing power and it was phenomenal in helping me understand every single math class, including EE/EECS. It made me sad to see them banned in exams, because having a 83+/89/any calculator was in no way helpful in any of the exams I took, but it was more of a "control the students" thing in college. The Math department determined that because they couldn't prove that people were not using the internet/portable PC's in their calculators, that they could not guarantee the fairness of it all.
Weird argument to make knowing that a 20 year old student was engineering a full internet capable PC into a calculator at the time would have been the envy of the world (and every engineering program).
This all depends on the quality of education and not simply handing out problems that require rote memorization of the methods to solve an equation and instead derive or figure out the equation yourself after understanding the problem after which you're free to use the calculator to "plug and chug".
What calculators are you guys using that aren't in academia anymore and don't need the "exam approved" limitations?
Or are we all just using software on our computers now.
That would be sad.
(I've had a Casio fx-991EX on my desk for a few years, that replaced a broken Casio fx-991ES. Though designed for academia, its operation is burned into my brain at this point.)
I use emu48 on my phone emulating the HP-50g, which was almost exactly the same size as the phone so my muscle memory somewhat carries over (minus the tactile feedback of a real keyboard). I still have the physical calculator on my desk at home, with no batteries in it so it's only usable within reach of its USB cable.
Anything that goes beyond what that calculator's UI can reasonably handle is going to end up in a Jupyter notebook or something like that.
Similarly, I still have my HP-42s but I usually use Free42[0] on my phone and tablet. They also have it for desktops. It's great if you like RPN calculators. Or if anyone wants to learn about them, you can use that program and follow along with the original manual(s)[1]. It's nice to be able to handle the order of operations without parentheses.
[0] https://thomasokken.com/free42/ I should send them a donation.
[1] https://literature.hpcalc.org/community/hp42s-om-en.pdf followed by https://literature.hpcalc.org/community/hp42s-prog-en.pdf
I collect HP calculators: I have an HP 12C, an HP 15C Collector's Edition (there are a few of them left still for sale), an HP 32Sii, and an HP 48SX. I sometimes use them, but whenever I'm in front of a computer (which is almost all the time), I find myself using the Unix dc command.
Handheld calculators are nice, but outside of exam settings, I could use a smartphone or a computer, though calculators are nice when I want to work distraction-free through something that requires performing calculations. I believe this is why HP largely exited the calculator market: HP's target market was professionals, and cheap computers and smartphones killed the calculator market for them, similar to how electronic calculators killed the slide rule. Texas Instruments, however, is still in the calculator business, largely due to their successful courting of American middle and high schools, as well as ETS and other testing agencies, beginning in the 1990s. I don't know the situation in Japan regarding calculator usage, but I see Casio scientific and graphing calculators proudly displayed at electronics stores such as Yodobashi Camera and Bic Camera.
I collect as well:
I use the HP-16C pretty regularly when I'm working on network protocol programming. I have good apps that do it, but there's something about having the calculator right in front of my keyboard rest and turning to it that I like more. In a pinch or outside the house I'll use JPRN instead.https://github.com/zathras/jrpn
I use a TI nspire CX CAS.
honestly, I think it makes no sense to spend more than 30$ on a calculator if it can't do symbolic math.
The way you input things like division, integrals, matrix, etc. on newer calculators like the nspire is far superior than the older calculators (eg. ti-84, ti-89, etc.). They look like how you write them on a blackboard instead of relying on purely parentheses or "," and ";" to separate parameters. It's like going from Excel to Mathcad
> What calculators are you guys using that aren't in academia anymore and don't need the "exam approved" limitations?
I still have my TI-85, but I essentially haven't used it since I left college. For 99% of what I need, I use either Python, or what's built into Firefox (e.g. unit conversion), or DDG. For that last 1% (e.g. full CAS functionality), I tend to grab whatever web-based non-AI tool is handy.
Web based AI tools are remarkably helpful these days since they no longer try to do math themselves and instead write python to do it.
The most common way for me to do basic arithmetic is by opening up a Python shell and using it as a calculator. This is what I typically do when I go through my finances every few months and calculate prices for things.
If I’m reaching for calculator, I’m reaching for my phone.
At that point I’m either using the stock iOS calculator or iHP48, HP48 clone.
It mostly depends on which page of apps I’m on and which is closest.
I like the unit conversion on the iOS calculator, easier to use for trivial calcs than the HP.
Biggest gripe on iOS is a single memory. On the HP I’m mostly hooked on the infinite stack, and that’s why I use it over the HP-42 clone app I have as well.
I used to keep my old TI-82 (or was it -84?) from high school and a simpler sturdy solar-powered calculator near my desk, but I realized I always just used either my computer (IRB in the terminal usually) or Apple's calculator app on my phone and never ever touched my physical calculators. So they've now been put in storage.
I still use my TI-89 from high school, but I'm interested to find if there are any open hardware/firmware calculator projects with basic engineering tools and a CAS.
emacs calc. It's RPN by default, inspired by HP RPN calculators. Also allows algebraic input.
Or often just a python repl
Ti89 emulator on my android. Muscle memory from high school and college use is strong.
Honestly, most of the time whatever the newest variant of the TI-30 is ends up being plenty (and what I have at my desk).
There's the NumWorks which is very similar for a more reasonable price, that also run Python
Numworks is so much better. According to kids that have access to Ti and HP graphing calculators.
The hardware and software design similarities between this Evo and Numworks is a strong endorsement.
And you can tell that TI pretty clearly copied the NumWorks calculator.
To bad it is still made for pupils and not engineers. I tried using it for computer science and math and it lost to a Casio
I used to doodle and make pixel art on my TI 84+ in high school. I'd spend entire classes just clicking left, right, up, down, and enter to move and toggle individual pixels with a simple program I'd written. https://timstr.website/artwork/ti84plus.html
It's a beautiful device so much that hacker inside me wants to poke into what CPU they have and design a similar one in Verilog myself then put it on FPGA with similar display and it's driver then a 3D printed case and keys too.
I'll take my father's HP 49g to my grave. but if TI wanted to flirt with me, all it would take is a setting to enable Reverse Polish Notation. (I did check the features, and no mention).
Why do you need an online calculator subscription? I can kind of get why you want a physical calculator, especially for a school environment, but why would you want a calculator online when you can just use... the rest of the web?
This has me pining for a future professional class CAS 3d graphing calculator.
I'm thinking something that could be a major upgrade in spirit to the long-in-the-tooth (released a decade ago) Casio FX-CG500.
Could use the soon to be released ARM C-1 Nano and Pro cores in an SoC with stacked 2GB LPDDR4, USB-C charging to a large battery, high-res transflective LCD...
Mockup "AxiomPad Pro X1": https://enia.cc/out/axiompad-cas-mock.png
Shout out to https://ticalc.org/ - the design is pretty much unchanged.
I didn't have a calculator until my senior year of highschool. But since we weren't alliwed to use them in tests, I didn't feel like I was missing anything.
As an engineering student at CMU, I had an HP 15c like everyone else. A few years back when I found out they are coveted, I sold mine on ebay. I have an emulator on my phone.
I assume that calculators will continue to evolve and that my grandchildren will have a Propædeutic Enchiridion.
My ti-82/83 got me into programming because I hated math so much that I taught myself to code an app that would help walk me through how to do various problems. I got in trouble but it was worth it.
Also, drug wars, x wing vs tie fighter, and all sorts of other awesome games were definitely the fun thing to do with these.
I still have my TI-83 plus. It's been with me for 25 years now! I've always kept it on my desk, despite the fact that I engraved 'KoЯn' on cover when I was 13 or 14.
Simply the best: https://www.hp.com/us-en/calculators.html
I learned to program on a TI-83 and later bought a TI-84+ with the cable that allowed me to transfer my apps and games between my device and other students devices. I have fond memories of hand typing into a TI-83 BASIC for hours using code I found online at the local library - games like Drug Wars and other similar choose this or that console based games. I would later get a USB cable that allowed me to download apps and games onto my device. Good times. Decades later and I'm still programming.
And those goddamn displays still have the pixel density of a Tamagotchi.
As someone who built a custom serial cable (not my idea, greetz to the original designer) to load assembly programs on TI-85s for all my friends, the “approved for exams” shit is so funny
$160 at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Texas-Instruments-TI84-TI-Calculator/...
Not as bad as I would've expected. Also, apparently it includes a very simple Python environment? https://education.ti.com/en/product-resources/eguides/eguide...
For a $10 BoM and maybe a year of R&D I would say that $160 is bad.
Their engineers are still trying to figure out how to make backlit keys. Just give them another two decades, I'm sure they'll crack it.
The $0.03 LED, $0.04 diffuser panel and the extra 3 cents for manufacturing keys with transparency will eat into their 93% profit margin. Can't have that. The children will just have to use a desk light.
A TI-83 was about $100 in the year 2000, and it doesn't look like it's that much cheaper today. I would've expected Texas Instruments to try gouging their very captive market.
But you can't divorce that from computing technology in general. A TI-83 used a z80 in 2000 and was priced at 1990's z80 rates, it was already gouging even back then! Now 26 years later the TI-84 uses an ez80 (or something something similar), which was introduced in 2001.
TI has always gouged their captive market. It is just increasingly ridiculous when those students also have smartphones.
FWIW I think these graphing calculators are quite good for 2026 students! It is nice to have a computer which is actually comprehensible. They just need to be more like $50. $160 is just evil.
This has a 156Mhz processor.
My lightbulb has more calculating power than that.
Shrug. The SAT and ACT don't let you use an iPhone on their exams. $160 is what the market will bear. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, it just is, and perhaps there's a market for a much cheaper competitor to beat TI here.
Is it a free market? Can students choose any calculator they want as long as it’s certified for their tests or is it mandated by the school?
You can use any calculator that meets the restrictions for things like the SAT.
However.
The entire year, your textbooks, your teacher, your in-class practice, was walking you through the specific commands you need to select to actually do the things, like graphing and solving.
If little Timmy is unable to read the manual about how to do math he doesn't yet know with whatever his specific calculator is, he is at a severe disadvantage, and the teacher basically cannot help him.
A friend in high school bucked the trend and used a casio in our TI based education, and did just fine for himself, but he was apparently a smart kid.
That problem could be solved by creating a 1:1 clone regarding buttons and user interface. But I guess TI has a good legal team to tackle that.
> $160 is what the market will bear.
You previously acknowledged it's a "very captive market" that you "would've expected Texas Instruments to try gouging" :) "$160 is what the very captive market will bear until the state-sanctioned gouging backfires" is a less compelling argument.
"Shrug" is kind of gross. Seems like you're being reflexively cynical.
Edit: to be clear the problem here is really local school boards being antidemocratic and unaccountable, not TI being greedy.
Seems like you're being reflexively cynical
There are plenty of things in the world for me to spend my limited supply of outrage on. Calculator pricing doesn't make it into the top 100.
It is an abysmal value. Your corner drugstore sells an AP/SAT approved calculator for $9 to $29.
I will buy one anyway because calculators remain a modest luxury that I want to indulge.
With a CPU 3x faster than a z80, you gotta wonder how many seconds per python instruction.
156MHz and 3,5MB user memory... Why do I feel like that is a joke these days.. I think some ESP32s are faster and have more memory, but not sure if they are fully comparable...
the best calculator is of course a RPN calculator, preferably a HP 48GX, but HP Prime also suffices. Swissmicros DM42N is a good second :-)
Interesting that this doesn't seem to include a computer algebra system like the Nspire CAS. Wonder if it's a testing environment compliance thing?
Absolutely is
Bring back the HP-10c. RPN with "scientific calculator" label. Pure and simple, and approved for testing that forbids any programmable devices.
EDIT: oops, conflated with HP-35, from a decade earlier. 10c was programmable. HP-35 was not.
HP48GX rules, HP Prime is a solid second. SwissMicros DM42N is a solid third.
I don't have a prime, but agreed on 48gx + dm42n without a doubt. I'd add the 50g as another contender, doesn't depend so much on external memory cards (which have the tendency to fail) and is fairly aligned with the 48/49 line.
Wasting time making games on my TI84 in the back of middle school geometry taught me how to program.
How is the battery life? Rechargeable sure is nice, but the older models lasted forever on 4 AAAs (at least my TI-83). That's one aspect that would justify the low processing power for today's standards for portable computing devices.
Loved it in university and still use it on my phone:
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.eanema.graph89/
I personally think this is stupid (e.g., the new interface for selecting functions). The interface on original 84 was better. I still have mine from 15 years ago. I still use it.
"Built to be a reliable learning tool, not a distraction"
They clearly haven't met a classroom of high school kids. Then again... I didn't have access to the internet in my pocket when I was in high school so....
They're most definitely trying to ride on the recent anti-technology in school push.
I have no idea how on earth a scientific calculator costs almost as much as a cheap android phone. Do they use oled and snapdragon soc these days? Back in my school days a 20$ Casio seems more than enough.
You will have to pry my TI-89 from my cold dead hands. I wish they still made it
Do these graphing calculators still use Derive (tm)? pity, there is no pc version anymore
There is something impressive about a product line that can remain culturally relevant for this long, even if part of that durability comes from a very protected niche.
Great memories writing games in TI-BASIC on sheets of loose-leaf paper to later transcribe manually into my TI-84+.
Hand reaches over and I lovingly pat the HP-67 sitting on my desk.
How are these still so slow?
I want a desk calculator keyboard that works with my phone. New TIs are just really cheap phones now.
Classic hacker mindset - the rule said no programmable calculators, so you made it say it wasn't one. Security through labeling.
Nice to see the hardware move forward. I still wish calculators were more open, or at least less locked into school-age pricing.
Python programming with 156 MHz and 3.5 MiB of RAM? Can a Python REPL even start up with that profile?
3.5 MB is pretty generous, actually! Some older TI-84 models had MicroPython running on a secondary ATSAMD21 processor with 32 KB of RAM - that was effectively unusable.
Who is using this on the SAT when there is Desmos?
What's the "online calculator license" ?
"Online calculator included (four-year subscription) •($80 value)"
Apparently just a TI-84 Evo emulator(?) that you can run in a browser for $20/year:
https://education.ti.com/en/products/calculators/graphing-ca...
My guess is that they are trying to encourage people not to use the various clones and unofficial emulators available for their calculators.
Q: Who else had their first exposure to programming on a Ti-83/4 calculator?
Does it run Doom?
That is the coolest graphing calculator I've ever seen.
Distraction free tools like this calculator, is increasingly important to help keeping focus.
I don't get it. Who is buying these calculators nowadays? It's expensive and any plot it can generate is 1 prompt away from the AI that students are already using. Also why is there a calculator license? what even is that?
Ti-30x is all you need.
price, 165$ which is ridiculous for a device that costs them less than 20$ to build.
If only they would build a Ti-84 RPN, I would snap it up in a heartbeat
Apparently, you can use it in RPN mode!
But can it play BlockDude?
It runs Python!
National exams will be wild for the kids capable of programming or vibe coding.
With a 156MHz processor and 3.5 megabytes of user-available memory the kids will even learn how to optimize their code!
Genuine question, who uses these in practice? In my experience, calculators beyond the basic were always banned in high school and college, cause everyone's so afraid people might store something into them, and afterwards it's just matlab and python. It's not like laptops aren't a thing that everyone has on hand.
Electronics engineer here. I use my HP Prime G2 daily in the lab for basic things as well as quickly calculating complicated stuff, since you can pretty much program it to do whatever you want.
You might say why not use Python or Matlab?! It‘s true that you don‘t need a small handheld device to do engineering calculations where there is a ton of other much stronger and free options out there. But the thing is, a calculator is a pure dedication to one thing. You turn it on, you do your calculation, get the answer and move on. It gets out of your way. Plus it is a better feeling to type stuff using the dedicated buttons in a calculator than using a keyboard.
IIRC You don’t use them in the dumb kids class much, you use them a fair amount in the sort of smart class, and you don’t use them much in the actually smart class.
These have been standard equipment (that you buy, or the school loans out) in middle-class US high school math since the 90's (and gone basically unchanged since then). The math books even have content tailored to particular models so that you'll have to buy them instead of alternatives from other vendors.
Those are permitted in schools and even exams in the US, for example. That’s also why they’re often so limited, to make the exam cartels happy.
You may have gone to a poor high school and college. I saw plenty of calculator use in high school and college a long time ago.
Poor? In what sense? I graduated a few years ago (in Europe) and I think I could’ve gone through my entire education without owning one. Math, for me, went from nice numbers to ugly numbers that you had to do by hand (because that was the point), then to just letters and squiggles.
At no point was there a need to work with hard numbers or to learn to work with a physical calculator (I haven’t seen one in the wild in years).
Sure calculators were allowed in some cases, the "scientific" kind, not the graphing kind.
But yes I would agree. So much time spent making sure people don't learn to use the tools they'll always have on hand. Programming exams on paper and that kind of inane bullshit.
If only kids of today loved this more than their phones.
Very very warm nostalgic fuzzy feelings here
But when will it run GPT? (:
75” 4k OLED screens would have been unobtainable when I first used a TI.
10yrs ago they would have been 4 to 5 figures.
Now they are what? A couple hundred?
How in the world is a TI graphing calculator still $160? These 30yr old calculator chips apparently hold their value like gold…
It’s got a 3x faster processor brah
Good point, my understanding of a cubic function in 02 was totally stunted by the processor speed…
Wow, no comment yet for https://xkcd.com/768/
You can claw my HP48 out of my cold, dead, hands.
I do have fond memories of my TI-82 (we couldn't afford the fancier 84 or 89). I wonder, though, after all these years did Texas Instruments corner the market and obtain an monopoly on allowed calculators for proctored tests or ... because it sure is a shame there's not competition here driving the cost of these things down and the features way up.
TI calculators peaked with TI-89/92/v200. Functionality, low latency UX, long battery life. These are still readily available in the second hand market, at very reasonable pricing (thanks to them selling well back then).
Unfortunately, ever since, they seem to have decided to imitate smartphones and focus on making restricted devices for exam taking, rather than tools to empower the user.
It's a shame that maths in American schools is equated with calculation. All you need to be a mathematician is a calculator!
Biggest ripoff in academics.
There should be a cheap open source calculators for schools and exams. It’s ridiculous that TI is still charging this.
The biggest ripoffs were the textbooks. Especially the textbooks written by the teachers, themselves, who forced you to buy them.
The Python inclusion is fascinating to me. I, like many other kids in the US, did a lot of calculator programming with the TI-84 back in school. It definitely taught me the basics in a way that made my CS classes much easier. I'm jealous of the kids who now get to make that journey with Python instead of TI-Basic.
But no mention of the most important feature… I just need to know that it can still play Drug Wars.
The only thing I used mine for in high school was playing Phoenix and Drug Wars.
The race to run custom code on these is on :D
Is there any information on exactly what kind of processor is inside this thing? Since running python I'm thinking it's actually a low end mobile processor.
Looking at the price of this and other calculators, I wonder if there's a market for "dumb calculators" analogous to dumb terminals: a device with the calculator form factor, keyboard, and display, but where the actual computation happens on a paired computer/phone or a cloud endpoint over WiFi/Bluetooth.
The cost of these devices isn't the computation, and if anything more connectivity would probably make these more expensive and harder to use (many "smart" devices in classrooms have networking issues and if even one of them can't connect, it hurts the ability to run a lesson). I think standalone computation abilities are pretty important, and connectivity can be a downside for preventing cheating in standardized exams etc.
It has Python? That's pretty cool.
It doesn’t have a qwerty keyboard. That would be such a pain to type on.
For some reason qwerty keyboard calculators are banned in tests.
I think those were aimed at different market segments. And that would be engineers, professionals and working academics that is not students.
Generally limitations in education on what was allowed led to more limited feature sets. Where as full feature set that could be upsold with qwerty keyboard was aimed for different users.
Can we still program assembly on this one? There must be a way to hack it open.
nostalgia
is any of this really necessary now that we have LLMs ?
ever been to school?
Yes, things that are not LLMs continue to be useful and interesting even though LLMs exist.
I hate what AI hype is doing to peoples' brains here.