Calculators I have known.
And loved.
Before we start, Texas Instruments is the only company that manufactures calculators in the entire world. It's regrettable that they hold a monopoly on the market to that great of an extent, but who else would be more qualified to make such indispensable items? I'm sure we've all heard rumors of calculator-like devices from companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Casio, but I don't credit any such rumors. I find it far more likely that these people are mistaking some form of new printer or synthesizer accessory for a calculator. Thirty years ago these same people were probably going out and buying the old TI Datamath to replace their Western Electric telephone.
Those poor, poor, deluded bastards.
That said, I fondly remember every calculator I've ever owned in the course of my Academic career, and each has its own very special place in my heart. I used these calculators every day over the course of many years, and though most of them have been lost, destroyed, or otherwise removed from my life, I'd like to think we shared something special if only for a short time.
TI-30X Solar
This was my first. It was specifically recommended by the sixth grade school supplies list and this plucky little calculator lasted all the way till right before high school. It had a truly inspired color scheme based in blues and grayish-black that I can still admire today. Considering our middle school math program was little more than a three-year holding pattern with convoluted word problems, it's no surprise I never got around to using all the features. Though it was a fully capable scientific calculator, its primary use was arithmetic (in the aforementioned exciting word problem form), covering the solar panel until the screen blanked out, and typing in 5318008 and then giggling. I regrettably tore the thing apart during the last year of middle school to get at the solar panel so we could use it for a Science Olympiad where the "plucky little calculator" became part of the "plucky little solar powered toy car that won me a bronze metal at state".
TI-83
First Graphing calculator. It pulled me through the first two or so years of High School math from geometry to algebra. Oddly enough, the graphing functions were never used in my classes, although I quickly discovered the joys of the sine and cosine curves even though I had absolutely no idea what the bloody hell I was supposed to do with them. Never was a big fan of the tangent. It looked ungainly on the screen since the TI-83 actually drew in the asymptotes and if the calculator drew it, it must be part of the graph, right?
TI-83 plus.
The TI-83 plus taught me an important lesson about calculators: They might seem like your eager electronic helpers but you can't turn your back on them for an instant. They're really tricky little bastards that have no scruples about fucking up anything more complicated than the basic arithmetic operations. In short the TI-83 plus taught me that calculators are fallible. You have to understand that even today the very thought that the calculator is fallible strikes me the same as calling the Eucharist "some watered down booze and an unleavened Sunday-morning cracker" strikes a diehard Catholic. What am I yammering about? Grab your nearest scientific or graphing calculator. Evaluate 3^3^3. Did you get 19683? It's wrong. As we recall from the orders of operations 3^3^3 is supposed to be evaluated as 3 to the 27th power. Every calculator I have ever used (excluding the TI-89, which we'll get to momentarily) evaluates the above as 27 cubed. Discovering that bug caused me more pain than the abrupt and melodramatic ends of all my first three or four relationships combined.
TI-86
After I broke up with accidentally lost the TI-83 plus I got this calculator, and it got me into the programming thing. After I read the manual I had laying around I realized I could input all the formulas I could find into the calculator and then sleep through physics. This snowballed for two years until I took the SATs and ACTs. Between the little programs I'd been writing and the inbuilt apps I was able to rip standardized testing a new one. Also, if you were extremely careful with your use of the i key you could finagle a jerry-built symbolic variable. I'd also like to thank whoever wrote the program that hid the actual program list and made it look like the memory was completely clear. However I should also point out to any intrepid youngsters out there that if I had actually studied even half the time I had spent memorizing the guidebook/manual, looking up obscure formulas, programming the aforementioned obscure formulas, and soldering in bizarre black market mod chips from Taiwan I probably would have done a lot better in those classes.
The amazing thing is it's one of the calculators I'm still toting around in my backpack these days. Not the same one I used back in high school, of course (that one caught fire in a failed modding attempt). I'm not a big fan. It's like the TI-83, only bigger and faster. I haven't really noticed a difference between it and the TI-83 plus. The feature set is pretty much the same, but they moved everything around, and overhauled the menu system. [Update: I lost it in-between the time I wrote this and the time I submitted it. The TI-86 was adequately marginal and will not be missed]
TI-89
Imagine you were pulled over by the cops while you were heading towards the airport, and they noticed a stinger missile in your backseat. That stinger missile is the TI-89. I have no legitimate reason to be carrying this thing around. None. No one does. I've yet to hear of any college or university that would even consider letting any of their students own, let alone use the damned thing. It's a fully-loaded 32-bit microcomputer system capable of symbolic manipulation, 3d graphing, pretty print, and lord knows what else. And here's the really dangerous part: from across a crowded testing room it looks exactly like one of the dozens upon dozens of lesser TI-8X calculators and their variations. As I understand it, this calculator is the sole reason my university doesn't allow any graphing calculators whatsoever. If you allow up to the TI-86, someone (namely me) is going to switch calculators during the test, and there is not a damn thing the average professor can do to catch it short of constantly scanning everyone's calculators with a pair of binoculars like the demented proprietor of a fire watch tower.
TI-30X IIS
Reunited and it feels so good. Reunited 'cause we understood....
Well, not really. The TI-30X IIS just doesn't feel right (by which I mean it doesn't feel exactly like the TI-30X Solar I used umpteen generations ago). The TI-30X IIS wants to be friends, though. Surprisingly, the boys over at TI managed to increase the calculator's functionality simply by adding four keys and implementing a pseudo-menu system. The old TI-30X had writing over EVERY SINGLE KEY, and running basic statistics was a hellish nightmare. Now it's simple, clean, and elegant. There are eighteen keys that don't have a 2nd use, and they've managed to add some probability features. Namely RandI which can be used to simulate the rolling of a seventeen sided die: 3, 13, 12, 2, 14, 6, 5, 9, 17. Wooohooo we're having fun now!
Also, they've added the "Ans" key, which makes all sorts of evil, evil crap possible. Remember kiddies: A less powerful calculator just means you have to be more creative. My only complaint with the TI-30X IIS (aside from the fact it is not, in fact, the TI-89 and it still has that damnable power bug) is that while Pi is treated as a symbolic value in radian mode the fraction/decimal conversion doesn't recognize it. If I ask for the arccosine of .5 it will give me 1.04somethingorother, but if I hit the "F<>D" key it won't recognize it as a fraction. That is, until I divide out Pi; then it recognizes 1/3. I'm just saying it'd save me a whole two keystrokes if it printed out Pi/3 to begin with. I'm a lazy, lazy Mathematician.