TI-89 basically saved my ass in collage. Not only that, I was the fourth "best student" in collage based on grade average. I modded the firmware so I was able to upload text docs organised in folders. Text filed had TOC, that made navigation easier. I was also able to search within those files.
If you became fluent using all features of TI-89 (integration, derivation, diff. eqs., shortcut keys etc.) and you had a solid abstract understanding of the subject (which of course required some studying), TI-89 basically got the rest of the job done in minutes. TI-89 was magic.
I had a TI-89 I got in 9th grade and had through the end of college, but I found I had the opposite experience with it. A goodly number of my engineering classmates used their TI-89s as a crutch and forgot most of the details of solving e.g. differential equations and computing integrals. In my case I found it faster to do most of the problem solving by hand, and I just used the calculator to punch in the numbers to get the final answer. I found after a while that my TI-89 just sat in my backpack doing nothing most of the time and all I needed was a scientific calculator for most things. About the only time I found it really useful was for solving for stability characteristics and tuning tedious PID loops for control systems problems. Solving characteristic polynomials for poles and zeros was just a pain in the neck.
It had a nice side effect of saving my bacon several times on final exams. On my engineering electromagnetics final I forgot to change the batteries in my TI-89 the night before and the calculator didn't work. I ended up having to re-derive a small bit of transmission line theory from scratch in order to solve the problems. I somehow managed to be one of the first people done anyway. I did have fun making arcade game clones and custom boot screens in assembly on it though.
I’m wondering too. I remember when I was in HS, one of my teachers said that they could easily spot if anyone was cheating with their calculators because almost all of the students that were not cheating would be focused on reading and writing by hand most of the time, and only occasionally reach for their calculator to calculate something with it. If someone was paying an abnormal amount of attention to their calculator, it could indicate that they had for example put notes on the calculator, or had some extra programs that had features outside of the allowed ones. So then the teacher might sneak up behind the student and have a glance at what they were doing on the calculator.
Also, to try and combat those kinds of things my school always had us show them the list of programs on our TI-84 Plus calculators before a test started, and we had to delete anything outside of what was allowed. That being said I think the calculator can be modded with custom things that could be hidden. So probably the best way of preventing people from cheating was by paying attention to who was using the calculator too much.
In my HS we had to reset our calculators before exams. I wrote a program that displayed the reset screen. I didn’t have anything exam relevant stored on my calculator but didn’t want to lose my copy of the ‘Penguins’ game.
You must have gone to an excellent high school. I’d be fairly surprised if any classmates of mine had ever installed programs on their calculators, my teacher was pretty surprised when I was showing everyone the game I’d put on mine.
I was majoring in CS in one collage and doing Business Management in another collage. Both had class that required us to memorise tons of lexical knowledge. For example I had two semesters of Corporate Finances. Lot of formulas (100+) had to be remembered to calculate different KPIs a corporation. I had all these formulas in a notes uploaded to the calculator. If a test questions required one to use, I opened up my notes, looked up the formula and used it. TI-89 was able to use variables, solve equations for different variables and convert units. Using the right shortcuts I just plugged in the numbers. Of course I understood how to apply these formulas, I just didn't have the patience to memorise them. Another class was Psychology. Had to memorise a complete book. No way I would do that. Instead collected notes from friends, organised them, digitised them, created well structured Table of Contents (all took about two days), uploaded to the calculator and used it during tests. You might ask why it was allowed to use a calculator during a Psychology final test? Answer is easy. At those times no teacher could image that notes could be stored in a calculator. TI-89 was just released, hardy available in the EU. So if they saw me playing with the calculator they thought probably the kiddo doesn't know anything and just pushes buttons to spend time.
Where do I report a bug? There's no such thing as a HP48GP. It seems that's a HP48G+
That calculator, even thirty years later is close to my heart. As far as I can remember, it was my first Internet purchase lightly used -- I was still in Hungary and I bought it from the USA -- and then we stacked four SRAM ICs on top of each other with most legs simple melted together vertically except for the select ones. Hand soldering SMT parts, yay -- a buddy did it, I am not crafty enough for that. In essence it became a much more expensive 48GX without the expansion slot. Dave Arnett himself was participating in these conversations, back then, which blew my mind. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.hp48/c/CS0lTpKkBHw/m/vn...
I remember thinking about upgrading my HP48G when I was in high school. In the end I saved up and bought the HP48GX plus a calculus expansion card instead. That came in handy for the Calculus and Physics classes I had that year.
The funniest thing I ever did back then was to hook up the serial port to a 1200 baud modem with lots of big red blinkenlights. I found a simple terminal emulator program and used it to dial out to the county public library system, which offered free email addresses. Once I got it working, I carefully coiled up my custom serial cable and a phone cord of sufficient length in a plastic bag and took them to school with me. Just before lunch near the end of calculus class I quietly got up and strung the cable across the room to a phone jack. Then I went back to my desk, typed in the AT command to start dialing, and grinned as the screech of the modem brought the lecture to an early conclusion. Of course my teacher was annoyed, but even he had join the laughter when I told him that I was just checking my email.
Even funnier if you knew that I spent most of my lunch hours either in my Physics teacher’s classroom playing spades (he taught the Calculus class right after lunch, which was convenient), or in the library where they had some terminals plugged into the card catalog system. You could break out of their telnet session and then telnet to wherever you wanted, so I often spent my lunch hour by checking my email (and then logging into a bulletin board to play the door games), so the modem wasn’t actually necessary.
Incidentally, I changed the title on https://archive.org/details/hp48gp-calculator to “HP48G+”, as you suggested. Changing the identifier is a rather more fraught process akin to deleting the item and reuploading it, so I’ll let it be. And I bet the MAME driver is named “hp48gp”, so it’s fine.
Now that you mention it, I don’t recall where I sourced the connector for the serial port. There was nothing unusual about it the connector, but I no longer remember that detail; oh well.
Got my HP50g in my last year of uni (physics) and I only wish I'd learned to depend on it sooner. Would have been fun figuring out calculus wizardry with a lisp-like language from the get-go.
When I was a child, I've had a Elektronika MK-61. [0] Not a graphing calculator, but it could be programmed. My father wrote some simple game for it (I think it was Bulls and Cows). I wanted to port Heroes of Might and Magic, not realizing that it's way too ambitious :-)
I bought one recently on eBay from a seller in Ukraine (despite the war, shipping is still up- from Kiev at least). I also bought its brother, an MK-52.
These calculators are interesting:
Extremely slow: inverse sin takes ~3 seconds.
Dead keyboard: they use foam for the key spring so there is almost no action. The plastic keys touch membrane contacts.
Leading digits are required before the decimal point: .5 is not allowed, you have to enter 0.5.
The result is only printed in scientific notation: so 1 / 5 gives 2e-1
MK-52: has non-volatile memory. You transfer between RAM and EEPROM via some extra functions.
Even with all these limitations, they are nice RPN programmable calculators with vacuum fluorescent displays. It's cool that they are made with an independent (from the rest of the world) electronics fabrication system.
Like Soviet radios, you get a copy of the schematics along with the calculator.
To get an idea, here are translations of the Cyrillic keys:
I use iHP48 as my default calculator app on my iPhone, and I do really like it, but it's a little irritating too, the main problem being that you have to be very slow and deliberate when typing out numbers. If you type numbers too fast it will likely drop a few. This isn't a problem most of the time, but I find it's an issue when I need to have multiple of the same digit (e.g. multiplying by 1000).
I use this too. It had its fiddly moments, but it’s pros far outweigh its cons. It’s not my default calculator, I still use the stock one for that. But it’s my next stop when things get busier.
The singular best benefit this has over an actual HP, for me, is a backlight. I find the original mostly too hard to read today. On the phone, it’s nice and bright and more than functional and useful.
Despite being a terrible price/per unit technology, I loved my TI calculators, but I was always sort of out of sync with everybody else trying to chase more symbolic math power. Everybody using a TI-82? I'll get a TI-85. School system migrates to the TI-85? I'll get a TI-86! University wanted a TI-89, I'll get the Amiga in a box TI-92+.
The downside? The teachers were only trained on a specific model, so I was always on my own. Good side? I was on my own to do whatever I wanted with these things. I turned my TI-86 into an animation flipbook and rogue-light dungeon explorer using TI-basic and the drawing tools on the calc. I loaded my TI-92+ down with games and even tried to write a shmup for it while learning C using an absolutely terrible early dev environment I pulled off of ticalc.org.
The ecosystem of hackers, apps, and gamers for these things is wild and very extensive. After university I looked on with envy as later TI calcs added more features and capabilities.
I still run a TI-89 emulator on my phone as the default calculator. It's so much more powerful than the crap calculator apps that come with the phones.
I had a similar pattern though for slightly different reasons.
My parents got me TI-83 for my calculus class in high school, which is what everyone had and I was in sync. I managed to drop my calculator down a sewer grating somehow, and I was too embarrassed to ask my parents to buy me a new one, and I couldn't afford another TI graphing calculator, so I ended up getting a substantially cheaper Casio FX-9750G at a thrift store, which actually turned out to be a reasonably good calculator for the price, and got me through Calculus I without too much trouble.
In calculus II I wanted the symbolic stuff, so I managed to find a used HP 50g, and I immediately fell in love with it (and RPN in particular), and ended up using it for everything. I got spreadsheet software installed on there, I played with 3d graphing, I got a clone of Zelda working, it was super awesome. It was almost more like a PDA than a calculator to me.
Similarly, I run an the iHP48 emulator on my phone as my default calculator now.
In retrospect they're probably more of a "Mac Classic handheld", but to my young eyes, deep in the demoscene, it seemed like a portable Amiga in the way that a HP or Sharp palmtop was a full PC.
The TI-89/92 series of calculators feature a Motorola 68000 CPU, and for reasons only younger me can remember, the design of the device felt more Amiga than Mac. The built in d-pad, different kinds of memory, and the integration of the system, it all screamed "GAMES" to me. The "exclusive" club of owners and passionate community of software authors for it also made me identify it more as an Amiga than a Mac.
Some of the stuff people have made for it is mindblowing:
This was the first I'd heard of the IA hosting emulations, and the first time heating of MAME. Incredible! Thinking about it now, it makes perfect sense. What's the point in archiving all this vintage software if you can't run it? Archiving emulations of eg consoles and having open spruce software to run the emulations is the perfect solution. Wonderful work by IA as usual.
even all these years later, despite that I have all these computing devices around me, I still feel like a kid in the candy store when I look at this. I was growing up in Mexico and very very occasionally I would see a kid with one of these old-school graphing calculators and just be super jealous. I did not get a chance to actually use one until I was an adult
I taught myself programming on a TI-81 by making a blackjack game. I'm not a programmer by trade, but a hobbyist. Still, turning on that 81 and inputting a GOTO brought back memories.
That was sort of my intro to programming as well, though decidedly less cool than a game.
I got really tired of typing out my physics equations by hand, and I was also bad at memorizing them for physics class, so I decided to cheat and write a program for the calculator that basically "plugged in" a lot of the equations for me.
It ended up being debateably useful, but honestly the act of writing the programs ended up actually being a reasonably good way for me to learn the equations anyway, so I kept it up throughout high school as a form of studying.
I loved writing programs like that during tests, really saved time for common operations. I was also very prone to mechanical errors so this saved me from that too. It was often easier in a multiple choice question to just have the calculator brute force the answers while I worked on the next problem. Totally permitted usage.
What's a good simple calculator for programmers? Easy entry/conversion of hex and binary but simple arithmetic with possible shifts. I don't need to do trigonometry.
I have one, bought it new many decades ago. If the SwissMicro clones have as good keys as the old HP originals then I wouldn't hesitate buying one of those if you're interested in a 16C.
SwissMicros make really good devices if you’re willing to pay the price. I carry my HP42 clone everywhere.
They make a clone of the programmer HP-16c that is pretty nice. Everything is open source too, so there’s modding potential if you are into that kind of thing.
Calculators are a relic of when we used to require separate single function devices to accomplish anything, like VCRs, Cameras, GPS receivers, music samplers, or transistor radios.
There is nothing a physical calculator can do that an IPython session can’t. And a physical calculator can’t copy paste the result where you want it (except modern phone camera OCR has I guess got to the point where you could probably grab the result off a calculator screen).
Outside of cases where you need dedicated pieces of hardware to accomplish a task, like motors or heating elements or something, there’s very little reason for preferring a dedicated device these days over a software or app equivalent. And even then, a version of the hardware that hooks up to a general purpose device to use its input and screen is likely the most useful form factor.
Modern ‘single function devices’ are most likely actually just low power multifunction computers running most of the functionality in software anyway.
Dedicated physical buttons are far superior to 'universal' touchscreen interfaces, if the thing you need fits on them.
And having a separate dedicated device helps having a workflow that doesn't invite distraction or context switching on a universal device, so having a dedicated device often is a reasonable intentional choice even if the same functionality is already available on another non-dedicated device.
Some numpads even come with an attached specialized screen to show you what you entered and a bunch of other features - they're called "calculators" :)
I use a computer, and, as you mentioned later, one with a keyboard connected. However, except for simple stuff I still reach for my phone which has an HP emulator running, to do calculations with what looks like an actual calculator. Except that it doesn't have those very special old HP calculator buttons, so it's much worse than the real thing (I have an HP 16C laying around, but not a general style HP). But still preferable to the computer. So, here I am, with a computer and having used computers daily for close to half a century, and still grabbing for a dedicated thing for doing certain types of calculations.
For those looking for a more usable emulator for every day life, some have been available for years. Having a ti 86 emulated on my phone was great when I was a student (and way cheaper than a real one..).
http://fms.komkon.org/ATI85/
I presume that it's stream-only, as in it can't be downloaded with a button. (Now, if that means that you can't grab whatever it's downloading by inspecting the requests, that's a different story.)
Modifications done to make it run in the browser make it historically / archivally problemstic, so it's restricting downloads. There is nothing related to these calculators not available in other locations on or offf the archive.
My beloved TI-85 is there and brings back so many memories. It served me well all those years at the university and then some. It’s screen is somewhat broken, so it’s good that we have an easy way to emulate it.
I had one too. I guess I did math on it, but I remember much more clearly downloading games to it via the graph link cable. I spent hours playing Tetris in math class.
Yes, the exchange of games and other programs was something that gave fame to this series of calculators. I also remember we had a fake program emulating the reset so we could avoid having our TIs wiped by the exam supervisor. Not proud of it, but I had a few formulas/macros on many exams :-)
The 89 is quite a feat of engineering and can do stuff like simplifying algebraic equations on the fly.
I always wanted something like a cross between the 89 and a spreadsheet where I could see my math represented as an algebraic formula to double check that everything was wired up.
I’ve always wondered how all of it worked inside the 89
They could have rewritten them themselves or just emulated them is where else. If they are just imaged from the original ROM chips, then is it legal to host them here and if so why? Is it not piracy or do they have permission or even cooperation, e.g. from TI? Or has their copyright (not sure if that's the right concept here) expired?
Lol, of course there’s no cooperation from the copyright holders; that would cost real money and generate no revenue. And the copyright, as usual for works created in the US, lasts for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. These things won’t be out of copyright for at least a century, so piracy is the only option.
If the copyright holders complain, IA will make the complained–about items dark. That means nobody can see them, though without actually losing any of the files or metadata. If anyone remembers the dark calculators a century from now, someone at IA will be able to reverse the decision and make them available to the public again.
> that would cost real money and generate no revenue.
This isn't necessarily true. In fact, it could be the opposite. It may be very good PR for them and could cost as little as some board meetings and some lawyers' time.
Tens of thousands in cost for $0 revenue. You can’t measure good will, and probably only a few hundred people would even notice. HP’s advertising department doesn’t get out of bed unless they’re doing a television commercial to be seen by a million people or more. That means printers, not 40 year old calculators.
I don't know why you have your head stuck in a rock. Corporations spend trillions on good PR and they have a plethora of ways to measure how they profit from it. "Good will" is branding and advertising.
Yet somehow they never ever help emulators. Nintendo actively hunts down sources of roms and destroys them, year after year. For every game they’ve ever made, even for games you’ve never heard of (all except that one single game that they licensed to someone else 40 years ago). EA kills off a few games every year, and those are usually just a few years old and still have players. A company called Atlus sued its own fans when they created a server emulator for an MMO that Atlus was shutting down (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS6oBjK8AwQ>). Software companies just do not care about the good will of their own customers.
Ahhh too bad. My current favourite calculator is a $10 CASIO fx-260 Solar II. It’s really compact, it doesn’t use VPAM, it’s really simple to use (no menus to navigate or anything like that).
I really like the $10 white Casio solar I got at CVS. It does a really good job with degrees/minutes/seconds which came in handy when doing gear setups.
Gear setups? That's really interesting! Do you mean gear ratios for transmissions and the like?
I've been using the degrees/minutes/seconds for astronomy calculations! It's funny because I bought the calculator after watching Dave do a review of it on the EEVBlog [1] youtube channel. He actually wishes they'd get rid of the DMS key in favour of some other keys he prefers for doing electronics calculations (polar <-> rectangular conversions). I bought it anyway thinking I'd have no use for DMS but here I am using it!
> Symbolic manipulation (differentiation, algebra) is not built into the TI-83 Plus. It can be programmed using a language called TI-BASIC, which is similar to the BASIC computer language. Programming may also be done in TI Assembly, made up of Z80 assembly and a collection of TI provided system calls. Assembly programs run much faster, but are more difficult to write. Thus, the writing of Assembly programs is often done on a computer.
I had a TI-83 Plus in middle school, and then bought a TI-83 Plus Silver edition for high school. The TI-83 Plus was the best calculator allowed for use by the program back then. FWIU these days it's the TI-84 Plus, which has USB but no CAS Computer Algebra System.
The JupyterLite build of JupyterLab - and https://NumPy.org/ - include the SymPy CAS Computer Algebra System and a number of other libraries; and there's an `assert` statement in Python; but you'd need to build your own JupyterLab WASM bundle to host as static HTML if you want to include something controversial like pytest-hypothesis. https://jupyterlite.rtfd.io/
Better than a TI-83 Plus emulator?
Install MambaForge in a container to get the `conda` and `mamba` package managers (and LLVM-optimized CPython on Win, Mac, Lin) and then `mamba install -y jupyterlab tabulate pandas matplotlib sympy`; or login to e.g. Google Colab, Cocalc, or https://Kaggle.com/learn ( https://GitHub.com/Kaggle/docker-python ) .
But NumPy.org, JupyterLite, and Colab, and Kaggle Learn all already have a version of SymPy installed (per their reproducible software version dependency files; requirements.txt, environment.yml (Jupyter REES; repo2docker))
Like MAME, which is the emulator for the TI-83 Plus and other calculators hosted by this new Internet Archive project,
Emscripten-forge builds WASM (WebAssembly) that runs in an application-sandboxed browser tab as the same user as other browser tab subprocesses.
Commodity markets with volatility on your monochrome LCD calculato with no WiFi. SimCity BuildIt has an online commodity marketplace and sims as part of the simulation game. "Category:TI-83&4 series Zilog Z80 games" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:TI-83%264_series_Zilo...
> CAS-equipped calculators are not permitted on the ACT, the PLAN, and in some classrooms[15] though it may be permitted on all of College Board's calculator-permitted tests, including the SAT, some SAT Subject Tests and the AP Calculus, Chemistry, Physics, and Statistics exams.
Also like MAME, if you have the ROM for your e.g. TI-84 or TI-89, you can run it with emulator apps for e.g. iOS and Android.
Other cool math calculation apps for phones and tablets without bash, git, python and conda/mamba: Geogebra, Desmos, QuantumQ, (FDroid Termux + conda, Waydroid,)
If you became fluent using all features of TI-89 (integration, derivation, diff. eqs., shortcut keys etc.) and you had a solid abstract understanding of the subject (which of course required some studying), TI-89 basically got the rest of the job done in minutes. TI-89 was magic.