And yes, TI calculators have indeed been improving, apparently.
The TI-84 Plus is a graphing calculator made by Texas Instruments which was released in early 2004. There is no original TI-84, only the TI-84 Plus, the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition models, and the TI-84 Plus CE. The TI-84 Plus is an enhanced version of the TI-83 Plus. The key-by-key correspondence is relatively the same, but the TI-84 features improved hardware. The archive (ROM) is about 3 times as large, and the CPU is about 2.5 times as fast (over the TI-83 and TI-83 Plus)[citation needed]. A USB port and built-in clock functionality were also added. The USB port on the TI-84 Plus series is USB On-The-Go compliant, similar to the next generation TI-Nspire calculator, which supports connecting to USB based data collection devices and probes, and supports device to device transfers over USB rather than over the serial link port.
So what you’re saying is that we’ve been dealing with shitty naming schemes in tech for decades?
[Sony has entered the chat]
wfxm100000mk4
I use these when I game on my Nintendo DS 3DS XL and have an adaptor to use a USB Type C 3.2 Gen 2x2 cable for easier connectivity.
Lol I’m pretty sure I have those headphones
They got it right with PlayStation. Sony’s other product lines should take notes
Ever try shopping for Sony earbuds? I feel like the model names are a riddle that the consumer needs to solve before they can buy.
The phones are mental too.
The Xperia range have a model number to denote the different models (similar to Samsung’s S and A) and a version number so if you say the phone’s full name it’s the Xperia 10 5 but the version number is in Roman numerals so it’s written Xperia 10 V, Xperia 5 IV, Xperia 1 V etc.
Destroy TI’s walled garden!
If only you knew what they’ve been doing to the embedded devices lately…
There is a website of a person who catalogs Texas Instruments calculators. You can wonder over to the graphing calculator section to see how many different graphing calculators they made along with a bit of information on each one.
I love websites like this.
That’s web 1.0. Many of us had sites like this on Geocities and Tripod back in the day.
I absolutely love them too because they’re so content dense where as today this would be a 15 item list where you had to click a new page to see each one while reading several paragraphs of what sounds like the most generic, 6th-grade book report on each one “The TI-84 is a calculator. Many people use calculators to do math…”
I love that you can tell they’re a product of passion. Someone was just really into something and wanted to share the info with the world. There’s something beautiful about that.
On my TI-83 plus, a fellow students and my calculator were matching rand(int) and it was amazing. Random wasn’t really random. I thought it’d be based on some sort of hidden internal clock.
True randomness is really really hard to do in software; bigger CPUs often have hardware random number generators that exploit some sort of quantum or otherwise non-determanistic phenomena, but in software the best you can do is pseudo-random. These are algorithms that generate a sequence of randomly distributed numbers, but in a deterministic way - from a given starting state, it will always generate the same sequence of numbers. Good algorithms are designed to make it hard to infer the starting state just by observing the sequence (if you can do that, you can run the algorithm in parallel and predict the next number), but that’s an active area of research.
At a guess, the calculator was programmed to initialise the random number generator from something that it is hard for the user to control (milliseconds since power on would be a good one) the first time you used it, but maybe TI got lazy and just initialised it to a constant value
You can set the seed, if you don’t the default is 0
You need to set the seed number.
thank you for reminding my to take out the dead batteries from my Ti-86 before they leak!
still have it next to my desk… since 1997 or so.
Do kids still use these? Aka, are their parents forced to pay $100 bucks for this piece of 40 year old technology?
They’re passed down as heirlooms now, like slide rules before them.
fun fact: there are graphing calculator emulators, even modern tinspire cx and cx2 models can be emulated (firebird emu) (as well as ti 83/84 etc, although obviously a different emulator is used for those models)
Schools own them a lot of the time
Here I think using GeoGebra is the norm now for graphing needs.
Desmos is it where I am.
They aren’t allowed anymore where I live. Only basic calculators now
Iircc the next level up was the TI 92 which could solve linear equations for you by default which was why they don’t let you use it on standard tests. Also cuz the Ti8x line can be quickly reset.
But does it play Doom?
Some kid in middle school put mario on my TI-83. The buttons were not ergonomic at all, but it was cool. I also wrote my first ever script on the thing; it solved the quadratic equation.
We all played a game called Drug Wars. It was text based.
Hobo Wars and Bubble Boy were my jam
That and “Redneck Rampage.” The point of the game was to get a 100% BAC
I did that back in the ‘90s on a TI-85 while everyone else in my class was sideloading Tetris onto their fancy TI-86es and laughing at my poor ass; iirc there was already a function built in for solving polynomials though so not only was I a poor loser, but I also wasted my time
I have fruit ninja on my ti-83. You swipe across the buttons to slice. It’s surprisingly not as awful as you’d expect
The TI-92 II we had in school sure did.
are there any applications for calculators anymore? I feel like since everything can be done on our phones or computers, what’s the point of a dedicated piece of hardware that’s generally inferior?
what’s the point of a dedicated piece of hardware that’s generally inferior?
Focus/concentration, kinda like how George R R Martin writes on an old DOS computer to eliminate distractions while writing (bad example for expediting work, I know). Still requires you to do a lot of the heavy lifting, which instills knowledge for the future.
There’s also an element of trust; schools generally trust Texas Instruments that their products do math correctly (you’d be surprised how many calculators don’t), the same cannot be said for MegaPower Graphing Calculator Pro (Ad-Free Premium) off of the Play Store.
What do you mean generally inferior?
It has physical buttons, no distractions, and the batteries last forever compared to a phone.
Except when you put it in “exam mode” and the LED stays lit until the battery dies.
I use a calculator at work, i could use the one in my phone. I like using my calculator though.
taking tests
Inferior hardware doesn’t mean inferior performance. Phones do much more than calculators, and calculators just calculate.
Pacemaker hardware is a million times less powerful than mobile phone hardware. But I trust it more to keep the heart going.
I have an HP prime I use at home and work. I also have the app that is identical on my phone, but I am much faster with the physical buttons on the actual calculator. Before I had my HP prime I had a TI 84+ silver and a TI 84+ emulator on my phone with similar experiences.
What is your job?
A traveling calculator salesman.
They last longer and are easier to handle in rough work.
I had one of these ti-84s.
I also had their “stat” one, it was like a ti-34 or something. It was way easier to use for probability stuff, and parenthesis and plugging in variables to simple polynomials.
Where’s my TI-86 plus?
Why did it have no GPS?
Because that would have eaten into their price gouging. In the age of the iPhone, Texas Instruments was able to charge upwards of $100 for a Zilog Z80 powered nothing machine because they’re quasi mandatory for high school and college students.
I bought my TI 36X Pro at $20.
I paid over $100 for my TI-84 in like 2012 almost 40 years after this basic ass hardware was created.
I figured out you could emulated the TI-84 plus on a smartphone for free, around 2012. I just used that for my college math class, but it probably would’ve been harder to get away with in a high school class.
