[vvpan]

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).

[pavel_lishin]

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.

[joebates]

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.

[mrguyorama]

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.

[beeandapenguin]

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.

[jrumbut]

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.

[w0m]

same. My first real exposure to coding was hacking Drug Wars on my brothers old ti-89 in math class.

[repeekad]

This new one has python, imagine

[hrunt]

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.

[mordechai9000]

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.

[hoistbypetard]

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.

[enneff]

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.

[iuffxguy]

Same! Ticalc.org was my original GitHub haha

[charcircuit]

You could get that same educational value from programming things on a smartphone.

[prab97]

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

[charcircuit]

It's much harder to type on a TI calculator than a smartphone.

[ezst]

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.

[duskwuff]

It's been a long time since I've done it, but I could type pretty quickly on a TI-83 - even with the silly ABC keyboard layout and all.

[kstrauser]

What's your favorite free programming environment for commonly used smartphones?

[ninjagoo]

> What's your favorite free programming environment for commonly used smartphones?

Termux

  pkg install python
  python
  print('hello')
  ctrl+D

Haven't tried these, but have seen them recommended:

Acode

Termux + neovim

Termux + code-server (vscode-like, accessed through phone browser at localhost)

[charcircuit]

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.

[squeaky-clean]

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.

[jval43]

I did, in Java 2ME for my Nokia. That was a completely different experience and much harder to get going. I did make a color 2D game though in about a week.

The TI-200 was much more accessible and fun, creating small little programs during or after class. Only once you wanted to go assembly did it become a chore again.

To summarize: not the same.

[tombert]

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.

[DSMan195276]

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).

[mttch]

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.

[kstrauser]

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."

[nick49488171]

The interface is great for what it does though. I still use ti-83 interface with the calculator app on my phone.

[tombert]

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.

[burnt-resistor]

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.

[arwineap]

Android app is called droid48

[burnt-resistor]

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.

[IIAOPSW]

I learned programming on that calculator. I learned programming because of that calculator. I owe so much to that calculator.

[jjcm]

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?

[BoorishBears]

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

[phatskat]

I faced a similar issue with my teachers in high school - iirc I was able to argue that by programming the formulas, I was demonstrating an understanding of them. Being able to show that understanding in our testing was the concern from my teachers’ point of view.

[IIAOPSW]

Wow, there were actually principles behind the rules and they bothered to reason about them. That's way different than my experience with school teachers.

[eagerpace]

Same. I hid custom calculators behind game levels so my teacher couldn't find them.

[BoorishBears]

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

[Merad]

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.

[Salgat]

My ti-89 titanium got me through two engineering degrees. Loved that thing.

[bradchris]

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.

[Rapzid]

Texas (TI) invented the handheld calculator after all.

[levocardia]

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.

[Arainach]

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

[zarzavat]

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.

[Arainach]

The ability to quickly graph functions and see them visually is an enormous aid to learning. Similarly, for various topics like statistics the ability to operate on a dataset is beneficial. Doing all of the raw arithmetic that goes into Chi Squared or whatever isn't particularly important for statistical analysis, and being able to get to the important bits faster is very beneficial.

Where to draw the line depends on the course. In general tools that "give the answer" for something where thinking provides insight are bad in education - for instance, a CAS which will simply compute derivatives isn't beneficial when taking Calculus. Things that eliminate grunt work not useful to that intuition - like computing the same formula 40 times to draw a graph by hand - are beneficial.

[sgerenser]

There’s no back room arrangement, beyond perhaps some amount of marketing from TI to math teachers. But nobody is getting a kickback to recommend the TI-84. Also, since so many people had to buy these things then stuck it in a drawer after a couple years, there’s a healthy supply of used ones on eBay and marketplace.

[rangestransform]

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

[tombert]

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).

[BizarroLand]

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.

[tombert]

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.

[badc0ffee]

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).

[krupan]

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!

[cj]

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.

[billxreynolds]

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.

[badc0ffee]

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).

[jasonfarnon]

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).

[LocalH]

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

[theodric]

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...

[badc0ffee]

(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 :).

[ezfe]

I used mine constantly in highschool (10 years ago).

[jhatemyjob]

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.

[sethops1]

I used mine in highschool (20 years ago) and still use one today.

[vitaflo]

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.

[kstrauser]

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.

[bluebands]

I use mine constantly in high school (now).

[Suppafly]

>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.

[al_borland]

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.

[Suppafly]

$100 for something you'll use all through middle and high school and into college isn't a bad deal.

[al_borland]

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.

[sanderjd]

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.

[stdatomic]

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.

[CivBase]

I got a ton of value out of mine... but I graduated in 2011, when smartphones were only just taking off and relatively few people had them yet.

But my wife is also a high school teacher and one of the most consistent problems I hear about from her is smartphones being a distraction. If she lets a kid use their smartphone as a calculator, odds are they'll soon be scrolling content feeds, playing games, or chatting with others. If her school required students to have a graphing calculator with limited functionality, it would probably be a benefit to her classroom.

[broadsidepicnic]

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.

[Groxx]

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.

[myvoiceismypass]

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.

[jgord]

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.