And yes, TI calculators have indeed been improving, apparently.
The TI-84 Plus is a graphing calculator made by Texas Instruments which was released in early 2004. There is no original TI-84, only the TI-84 Plus, the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition models, and the TI-84 Plus CE. The TI-84 Plus is an enhanced version of the TI-83 Plus. The key-by-key correspondence is relatively the same, but the TI-84 features improved hardware. The archive (ROM) is about 3 times as large, and the CPU is about 2.5 times as fast (over the TI-83 and TI-83 Plus)[citation needed]. A USB port and built-in clock functionality were also added. The USB port on the TI-84 Plus series is USB On-The-Go compliant, similar to the next generation TI-Nspire calculator, which supports connecting to USB based data collection devices and probes, and supports device to device transfers over USB rather than over the serial link port.
There is a website of a person who catalogs Texas Instruments calculators. You can wonder over to the graphing calculator section to see how many different graphing calculators they made along with a bit of information on each one.
That's web 1.0. Many of us had sites like this on Geocities and Tripod back in the day.
I absolutely love them too because they're so content dense where as today this would be a 15 item list where you had to click a new page to see each one while reading several paragraphs of what sounds like the most generic, 6th-grade book report on each one "The TI-84 is a calculator. Many people use calculators to do math..."
On my TI-83 plus, a fellow students and my calculator were matching rand(int) and it was amazing. Random wasn't really random. I thought it'd be based on some sort of hidden internal clock.
True randomness is really really hard to do in software; bigger CPUs often have hardware random number generators that exploit some sort of quantum or otherwise non-determanistic phenomena, but in software the best you can do is pseudo-random. These are algorithms that generate a sequence of randomly distributed numbers, but in a deterministic way - from a given starting state, it will always generate the same sequence of numbers. Good algorithms are designed to make it hard to infer the starting state just by observing the sequence (if you can do that, you can run the algorithm in parallel and predict the next number), but that's an active area of research.
At a guess, the calculator was programmed to initialise the random number generator from something that it is hard for the user to control (milliseconds since power on would be a good one) the first time you used it, but maybe TI got lazy and just initialised it to a constant value
fun fact: there are graphing calculator emulators, even modern tinspire cx and cx2 models can be emulated (firebird emu) (as well as ti 83/84 etc, although obviously a different emulator is used for those models)
Iircc the next level up was the TI 92 which could solve linear equations for you by default which was why they don't let you use it on standard tests. Also cuz the Ti8x line can be quickly reset.
The TI-92 wasn’t allowed on standardized tests due to the qwerty keyboard layout making it be classified as a computer device in the US. The TI-89 has the same CAS functionality as a TI-92 Plus, but in a standardized test approved physical form factor.
Some kid in middle school put mario on my TI-83. The buttons were not ergonomic at all, but it was cool. I also wrote my first ever script on the thing; it solved the quadratic equation.
I did that back in the ‘90s on a TI-85 while everyone else in my class was sideloading Tetris onto their fancy TI-86es and laughing at my poor ass; iirc there was already a function built in for solving polynomials though so not only was I a poor loser, but I also wasted my time
are there any applications for calculators anymore? I feel like since everything can be done on our phones or computers, what's the point of a dedicated piece of hardware that's generally inferior?
what's the point of a dedicated piece of hardware that's generally inferior?
Focus/concentration, kinda like how George R R Martin writes on an old DOS computer to eliminate distractions while writing (bad example for expediting work, I know). Still requires you to do a lot of the heavy lifting, which instills knowledge for the future.
There's also an element of trust; schools generally trust Texas Instruments that their products do math correctly (you'd be surprised how many calculators don't), the same cannot be said for MegaPower Graphing Calculator Pro (Ad-Free Premium) off of the Play Store.
I have an HP prime I use at home and work. I also have the app that is identical on my phone, but I am much faster with the physical buttons on the actual calculator. Before I had my HP prime I had a TI 84+ silver and a TI 84+ emulator on my phone with similar experiences.
I also had their “stat” one, it was like a ti-34 or something. It was way easier to use for probability stuff, and parenthesis and plugging in variables to simple polynomials.
American kids and their damn fancy calculators. I got through a technician degree in Electronics and a Grad degree in Robotics with a Casio FX82. It can display two lines with simple letters and numbers, no graphs. It also stores up to 6 numbers in memory.
This is a stupid take. Try that on Windows 7's 3-number calculator (basically replicated in Windows 10's standard mode calculator) and see what happens: 8+9 will get calculated to 17 the moment you hit the + after 9, and 17 gets stored in the first memory.
Because that would have eaten into their price gouging. In the age of the iPhone, Texas Instruments was able to charge upwards of $100 for a Zilog Z80 powered nothing machine because they're quasi mandatory for high school and college students.