Comment by alnwlsn

Comment by alnwlsn 2 months ago

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Is the Ti-84 still the gold standard for school calculators? I had an nSpire when I was in school - much higher resolution screen - but most everyone else had a ti-84 or 89. The nSpire was powerful enough to have hacks for it to run full Gameboy games. Many minutes were spent playing Tetris after an exam.

Also interesting that I almost never see any overlap between the Z80 TIs and the greater retrocomputing community. Probably because most retrocomputing enthusiasts are too old to ever have used one. The 82/83 is definitely old enough to qualify as a retrocomputer in it's own right.

max51 2 months ago

The gold standard will depend on what rules the school has for the exams.

The absolute best one you can get right now would probably be a nspire CX CAS ii but I doubt you'd be able to use it in an exam. Even in university, symbolic calculators are typically not allowed in math classes because it's basically like having full access to Wolfram Alpha or Mathematica.

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Sohcahtoa82 2 months ago

> Is the Ti-84 still the gold standard for school calculators?

When I was in high school (1996-2000), most had a TI-83, with some having a TI-85. I got a TI-89 since it was the best calculator that could be used on the SAT. Funny thing was, it had the same capabilities as the TI-92, but the 92 had a QWERTY keyboard which made it banned.

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  • xp84 2 months ago

    Nearly same here, 2 years behind you. 83+ had just come out which I think added some Flash memory for Archiving and installing ASM apps (mostly games is what we used that capability for). 85 was out there but uncommon, and the richest or smartest kids had 89s, which were and still are an absolute beast. It blew me away watching people solve equations and simplify expressions on that.

    To answer OP though, I think the reason the 84+ (which is or just emulates the old Z80 goodness of the 82/83/83+) is still wildly popular* is that more advanced calculators can easily do a LOT of stuff for you -- right out of the box -- that you're ostensibly there to learn to do yourself, which brings into serious question why bother taking the class in the first place. So teachers would prefer kids to bring a less overpowered calculator to class.

    An 89 is basically to say, Calculus AB as a standard 4-function calculator is to 3rd grade math.

    None of that is a knock on any of those calculators, though. It's incredible what they can do!

    * Let's all take a moment to appreciate the genius of TI repackaging the same 1970s technology in a shiny new case every few years and getting away with -- STILL to this day -- selling them for $150!

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6SixTy 2 months ago

Nspire CX class were powerful enough to run quite a lot of GBA games. And I think the Ti-84 is probably still kicking around because no one really wants to bother buying more overpriced calculators that work just fine. The Z80 TIs are quite interesting in their own right, but a good majority of people are probably bored just thinking about such a device. Same thing with the Z80 based Rabbit 2000/3000/4000.

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to11mtm 2 months ago

> Is the Ti-84 still the gold standard for school calculators?

Likely.

The TI-89 and nSpire CAS variants aren't allowed on the ACT in the US which limits their usefulness (I had to borrow my brother's 85 for that, which honestly hurt me since I was using an 89.)

> The nSpire was powerful enough to have hacks for it to run full Gameboy games. Many minutes were spent playing Tetris after an exam.

The TI-89 is a bit of a beast in it's own right. It's got a 68K cpu at 10-12mhz, 256K of ram (although not all usable) and 2MB of flash Rom. Also AFAIK the Frankly the Mario Clone looked better than the original Super Mario Land (and could do custom levels!) Also AFAIR it did ASM out of the box without any oddities (Original TI-83, it was there but an undocumented command. 83+ is I think when asm() became the standard.)

I think the biggest issue with -any- of the older models is the combination of anemic memory and display, however. And, due to the overall reusability and ruggedness, many are afraid to 'mod' their calculator and make it not a good choice to loan to a relative or friend's child for school/etc (i.e. even if unmodded, if it looks like it -was- modded, probably can't use on standardized tests)

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namdnay 2 months ago

FWIW my kids in France had to have “numworks” calculators. A lot more modern than the Tis of old (and cheaper!)

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  • auguzanellato 2 months ago

    Those were also full open source until some time ago, then they switched to source-available for the userland with a closed source kernel to prevent modifications allowing cheating on exams. It’s sad they had to take away freedom from the majority of users just to prevent a minority cheating.

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  • MengerSponge 2 months ago

    And they run python!

    https://www.numworks.com/

    There's even a smartphone (iOS & Android) app to give it a try, but the magic of a calculator comes with tactile buttons.

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    • xp84 2 months ago

      Wow. The single click to get to the full emulator from that homepage is an awesome, refreshing thing to see. Seems like a great calculator (and company) to standardize on. I don't even hate TI, but this thing is clearly far more advanced than the TIs I grew up on.

      If the 84+ was $40 by now I would feel differently, but I think TI could have at least built something like the Numworks (with things like real fraction notation easier menus, and a lighted color screen) if they wanted to continue charging the same price now as they did 25 years ago for what was then a pretty respectable piece of tech for its time. Instead they did that innovation but only on calculators too overpowered to be allowed on tests, and left that market with a stagnant TI-8x series.

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    • alnwlsn 2 months ago

      I find it really funny that the newer TI stuff has Python now too. But they just stuck an extra ARM microcontroller on board (which is more powerful than the main ez80 CPU). If it ain't broke, support it for 32 years!

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  • hi-v-rocknroll 2 months ago

    It's a shame it doesn't use Giac. RPN CAS forever! ;)

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    • auguzanellato 2 months ago

      You can run KhiCAS that’s a port of Xcas as a third party add-on, there are some weird limitations but it mostly works.

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ActorNightly 2 months ago

TI 89 was my goto in college. The algebraic equation solver was pretty good.

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