[ziofill]

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...

[hypercube33]

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.

[drfloyd51]

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.

[teruakohatu]

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/

[59percentmore]

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.

[ivangelion]

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.

[59percentmore]

I'm not sure how the favorite (families have them) doing what the family wanted (becoming the one who is successful) is spiting anything.

And it sure would be funny if the calculator was a one-off instead of just one instance in a pattern of dysfunctional parenting that taught:

Son 1: The family will always have your back, no matter the outcome as; you'll be rewarded, so long as you try.

Son 2: No matter what you accomplish, you will be valued less.

Real laugh-riot there. Hope that clears things up.

[thaumasiotes]

> 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.)

[IX-103]

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.

[jonhohle]

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.

[bloppe]

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.

[Philpax]

weird grudge to keep for twenty years, man

[59percentmore]

Weird thing to do to your preteen in your 40s.

[glitchc]

Sounds like he needed all the help he could get.

[ziofill]

ooh good catch! it was a TI-83, got confused right there (it was before 2004)

[serf]

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...

[fsckboy]

had to search that, NEET is India's National Eligibility cum Entrance Test.

No, I was too scared to ask.

[jacobolus]

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.

[cwel]

Gonna guess you are the NEET

[stringfood]

why are you attacking your brother lol

[the-grump]

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.

[ActorNightly]

I had a Casio that was multi color, because I thought it was cooler. Display was nice, functionality sucked.

[a96]

I had a Casio as well because, IIRC, it was the only thing the shop had. Eventually I had to also get a TI because it allowed using imaginary numbers in a matrix operation. Not that that was used in more than one course after all. But I grew to like it and even had an emulator for a long time on my first smart phone.

But yeah, Casio was definitely more friendly and polished in UI, but dumber. You could only use "wizard" type things and pseudo gui clickies while the ti was crude and text-heavy but let you enter just about anything anywhere and seemed more symbol and language oriented. Which one was nicer in use? I guess it would depend on how much of that language you could memorize. Or browse a cheat sheet for.

[brewdad]

I had a Casio because it was $10 cheaper than the TI. Man I was jealous of the "rich" kids.

[rbanffy]

I have a happy story about Casio and college. I started college with a very limited TI-55 calculator: 51 steps and no conditional branching. The rich kids got HP-41 calculators, the average ones got programmable Casios. I got a Casio PB-700, programmable in BASIC.

Best gift ever. I could finish all numeric methods tests in a fraction of the time it took for others to use or program the ordinary calculators. It was a huge qualitative leap.

[7thpower]

Was this the first time you had realized that they did, in fact, love you the entire time?

[TheMagicHorsey]

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.

[Archelaos]

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...

[radicalcentrist]

Are we expected to know latin, or is this supposed to be a little homework assignment for us? Ridiculous.

[DivingForGold]

Rather obviously these days one can copy/paste the Latin into google translate in mere seconds for relief ...

[i_think_so]

Google? Eeewwww!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpgTqRxaC0c

[theodric]

You're expected to use technology to break through the language barrier

[joquarky]

FOMO burnout is real.

[khazhoux]

Yup, classic Martin Luther!

[ralusek]

If my grandmother were to find out that housekeepers occasionally do actually take things, it would set us back decades.

[mbreese]

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.

[linsomniac]

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.

[jkubicek]

This is why you always mount outlets with the grounding pin facing up!

[Ekaros]

Or have sensible outlet design where prongs are always recessed.

[axus]

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.

[enneff]

This is why you have modern circuit breakers.

[cluckindan]

How does that help?

[linsomniac]

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.

[kstrauser]

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.

[y1n0]

It doesn't.

[linsomniac]

... 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.

[joshcartme]

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

[linsomniac]

Agreed, I have seen that.