By: Hatless Jack [2005-09-15]

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.

I like TI-30s [2005-09-15 00:29:22] mobiustrip
I lost my first TI-30 somewhere in my highschool, probably got picked up by someone who had lost theirs. My second one got run-over by my dad's truck. See, I was riding in the bed of the small pickup with my bicycle clutched protectively to my body, and the calculator fell out of my pocket. Because my dad bought the truck off some metalhead for $500, it had a bed made out of rough timbers with a gap for the fuel tank to stick out. My poor calculator fell through the gap and was run over by the back tire.

R.I.P. Calculator.
Data Collectors [2005-09-15 00:50:20] König Prüß, GfbAEV
I liked TI products, OK. There were a couple of TI-26's that I had. There was another TI that was great for linear entries. But most of the surveyors used HP--Now, there are data collectors that have 8086 innards and are menu-driven. They will calculate, but the main purpose of the data collectors is collecting or storing x,y,z co-ordinates. My note-keeping was always a little messy, so I am glad for the data collectors, I can map a piece of ground with the collector plugged into the transit, then plug the collector into the office computer. That will draw topographical maps! Then, if I have a dozen house designs that I want to arrange on the land, with roads and utilities, Vango will do that, and minimizing earthwork and maintaining natural contours. The co-ordinates will work for AutoCad, too. It's a long way from the early Friden electro-mechanical calculators that weighed about 80 pounds.
padded cell [2005-09-15 03:47:23] pithymood
hey eds,

howzabout some nice cell padding on the table containing them feature articles? you makin' me claustrophobic.

calc you later,

SHARP EL-509H


p.s. welcome back
Fuck HP. [2005-09-15 04:28:03] Hatless Jack
Reverse polish notation my ass. You shouldn't have to have a working knowledge of symbolic logic to use their goddamned number-wahoozits.
No Equals Sign [2005-09-15 05:33:17] König Prüß, GfbAEV
I must admit that I like the standard sort better than a calculator with no equals sign. I had three fine TI calculators stolen! and the bastard broke my good briefcase to steal them, too! I think that they were TI-33's, cheap, but impossible to replace. One damned engineering co. in Alamo, California made me buy an HP-42 just as they quit making them, the co. had some of their own software that we had to use. HP, I think that it was Hewlett who was a surveyor, so they got that market. Now, I think it's the HP-71's or something that a lot of that software is written for, but also the 8086-based machines are better and taking over with Intel guts. It's still fun to hand an innocent rube an HP and ask them to add 2+2! Then they can't find the = sign! Watch the fun begin!
TI-33? [2005-09-15 06:26:34] Hatless Jack
No big loss there. The thirty-three was the only calculator TI made that was more useless than its predecessor. It also seems the thirty-three was only sold in Europe between 1977 and 1978. Funny thing about calculators: you tell someone the model of calculator you once used and you tell them a part of your life story. Also:

Huh... [2005-09-15 06:31:34] Hatless Jack
There was supposed to be a link to www.datamath.org at the end of that post.
Slide Rule [2005-09-15 07:20:17] König Prüß, GfbAEV
Ha! I know how to use a slide rule! And don't think I won't!!! When I was surveying, they didn't HAVE effing push-button sine and cosine, we had to look it up in a book! When we were measuring and it wasn't horizontal but a slope, we had to look that up! So, I am more than glad about calculators with arc-sine functions. And GPS!?!? And GIS!?!? I have surveyed some of the same points that George Washington surveyed, and some of them are wrong by several meters/feet. But in his day there was so much land that it didn't matter. Kauffel&Esser slide rule, that's the ticket. And a Caterpiller D-9 with afterburner.
what's yer function [2005-09-15 12:30:07] posthumous
How do you like my function keys? f1, f2 and fu!!!
/ [2005-09-15 16:43:46] Vicarious
Here is a picture of a TI-89: http://www.exponenta.ru/soft/Others/ti/RIS1.JPG I hope you like it.
vicarious thrill [2005-09-15 16:52:24] posthumous
God, that's hot. It makes me want to calculate something really, really hard...
Hell [2005-09-15 17:46:31] Sean
That's a nice touch that the calculator is saying "hell"
amazing [2005-09-15 18:42:53] posthumous
amazing what a fella can do with MS Paint. I was inspired by antwan. I'll never forget his picture of a volcano... or was it a ufo? no, it was ass!
Oh yeah, baby... [2005-09-15 21:16:37] Hatless Jack
I'm going to go factor me some high order polynomials right now.
Calculators [2005-09-16 01:50:37] Antwan
I only recently learned the joys of not having to graph by hand. No longer do I need to convert the formula or plot the slope or whatever the hell I pretended like I was doing.
IT BEGINS. [2005-09-16 01:56:40] Antwan
And I quote: "amazing what a fella can do with MS Paint. I was inspired by antwan. I'll never forget his picture of a volcano... or was it a ufo? no, it was ass!"

I was going to be nice Posty. I was going to call truce and allow us both to get on with our lives. But now, It's on. And this time, it's personal.
Yo, Antwan! [2005-09-16 02:05:09] König Prüß, GfbAEV
What you need is a good calculator!
but but but [2005-09-16 03:34:26] posthumous
but you ARE going to be objective when you critique my Zirealism, aren't you? AREN'T YOU?
Objectivity. [2005-09-16 05:11:54] Antwan
Of course. Having a biased opinion would just be spiteful and ill-spirited.
Calculadora! [2005-09-16 10:47:49] Vicarious
I'm going to buy Antwan a calculator. Did you know that "Calculatrice" is French for calculator? Yes it is!
calculatrice [2005-09-16 12:42:48] posthumous
sounds more like a bug that burrows underneath your fingernails and comes out all adult and winged just as your typing an important e-mail to your boss. you panic of course and type an obscenity and then press send without realizing what you're doing. dipshit.

not to mention it really hurts.
/ [2005-09-16 13:47:35] Vicarious
Posthumous, you're my favourite orgone accumulator.
TI-85 [2005-09-16 16:42:59] casey
I had a TI-85, which quite similar to the TI-86. Likewise I programmed all sorts of functions into the thing and shared them with Aaron Lawson who had the same calculator. The "Solver" was invaluable: it allowed one to enter an equation and then enter values for all variables except one. The calculator would then solve the equation for the missing variable! Very exciting.

Once I put all the important formulae in the calculator, I was free to spend all my time in math class programming pong. Regrettably, not in assembly.
TI-89 [2005-09-16 18:46:03] Kyle
An unnamed university of oregon allows all comers into their Math Department. The TI-89 is the sole reason I escaped Taylor Series computations unscathed. I will keep it with me forever.
Mother of all that's firey and damned. [2005-09-16 19:16:06] The Cheat
I hate calculators..I just had to spend 110 bucks on one because I didn't have time to go to walmart but instead had to visit the University's book store.

AND WHEN THE HELL did this place get back up? WHEN IN THE HELL, THE E-HELL.
What's Going On!?!? [2005-09-17 17:45:45] König Prüß, GfbAEV
It just doesn't add up!
EVE! [2005-09-17 18:09:03] Dedas
I hate calculators, but I love Eve! Where art thou my love?
On a sidenote I actually own a TI-86...
hi [2006-07-25 01:39:49] Terriana
it is fun to use caculator
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