I suppose it depends if you took advanced math classes or not.

I know technology has moved on and all, but much nostalgic respect to these amazing calculators.

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.

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.

- 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

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).

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).

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

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?

I wouldn’t have been able to function without it in school (20 years ago). But we also didn’t have iPhones.

When a calculator is used in a classroom, there's a concern about people using the calculator to replace the skill that's being taught. So, for instance, there's space for a calculator with no CAS, for a class that's trying to teach you to do algebra. That is in some ways easier than "don't use this function of the calculator".

That screen resolution for one is horrible for 2026.

But yes I would agree. So much time spent making sure people don't learn to use the tools they'll always have on hand. Programming exams on paper and that kind of inane bullshit.

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.

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.

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 :).

Originally that blocked the Ti-92, but then the Ti-89 and Nspire line had numeric keypads + CAS

Math problems should not require any calculator. Physics problems should require a scientific calculator. Overcomplicating the arithmetic shouldn't be the point.

Also I don’t know about you but these days I welcome stuff that allows me to stay away from the damn phone.

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.

TI has always gouged their captive market. It is just increasingly ridiculous when those students also have smartphones.

FWIW I think these graphing calculators are quite good for 2026 students! It is nice to have a computer which is actually comprehensible. They just need to be more like $50. $160 is just evil.

Why are they still able to sell what is effectively a 30 year old computer for as much or more today than when it came out? Because they managed to get the family informally standardized as "The calculator every teacher in America understands well enough to manage students who use it. Therefore pretty much everything else that could be as or more advanced is effect banned."

It was an amazing piece of kit when it first came out. No doubt you could make something 100x better and 10x cheaper today if someone really tried. But, they would fail commercially because you can't design-in 30 years of legacy in the US school system.

https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=NMAH-DOR2014-05202...

tests like SAT, ACT, and some AP exams are using Desmos, yes

however:

- this means you have to fiddle with a popover window and can't always see the full problem (especially when the reference sheet is also online)

- you have less muscle memory and often take longer

- harder to multitask (you use paper anyways, and the paper to calculator friction is lower than the paper to trackpad friction

- trackpads on school computers are usually worse, which compounds the problem

- some specific functions just don't exist

essentially using Desmos is like using a physical mouse/trackpad, while using your calculator is like using VIM motions and keyboard shortcuts with a concave split keyboard. it's technically more intuitive and can help in certain scenarios, but it's useful to have both.

this sounds trivial, but it's not, especially on tests where you have about or less than a minute per question

ideally you have both a handheld calculator and Desmos though

One thing that I remember vividly was you had no MUL or DIV, so you have to implement them yourself with shifts, adds, subtraction, etc. This was an extremely useful learning experience

>Kerm Martian

There's some names I haven't heard in a while :)

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.

Doesn't mean it's not overpriced, but that's one reason and you can get a used TI-83/84 for like $30 or less. They pretty much never break.

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1. Okay, the Casio can QR-code-link you to a graph, but if I have internet/smartphone there are better graphing tools anyway, like Desmos.

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.

https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-115ESPLS2-Advanced-Scientifi...

Includes GCD and LCM, some of the newer ones don't have them.

If you want graphing, there is the newish fx-CG100 has a nice display, but they removed Casio basic, it now only has micro Python (way too awkward to type on a tiny keypad):

https://www.amazon.com/Casio-ClassWiz%C2%AE-Calculator-Funct...

The older ones that still have basic:

https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-9750GIII-Graphing-Calculator...

BTW, here is a review I made of many calculators, measuring keyboard efficiency: (HP-15c still the best)

https://github.com/jhallen/calculator/wiki

I mean, these days kids have smartphones, what's the point of a graphing calculator?

There isn't one.

The TI-83 is just a $160 tax on every high school student. There is precisely zero use in a graphing calculator before university.

If you ever need a plot of literally any function you'd be plotting in high school, you should be able to do a very quick, very rough approximation by hand. If you can't, you haven't learned the material.

Well, it is ;) The Swiss Micros clones are pretty awesome:

https://www.swissmicros.com/product/dm41x

This is substantially inaccurate.

1) Not all ARM Cortex series CPUs have TrustZone. It is absent on many Cortex-M microcontrollers, for example.

2) TrustZone is an operating mode of the CPU, not an "admin processor". Depending on the part, it is often made accessible to developers. (Whether that includes third-party software developers is, of course, up to the device manufacturer.)

For more information, see:

https://developer.arm.com/documentation/100690/0200/ARM-Trus...

Reason : making due with more scarcity increased independence and critical thinking.

I don't know if that was your point...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Casio-FX-9750Glll-Graphing-Calcul...

The reason you can get used ti's for $30 is because that's how much they're actually worth.

You can get a catiga if you really want for like $17: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256809054964211.html

... or you can go with TI for $160 ...

It’s my favourite calculator and the one I always reach for, despite having a bunch of more complicated 2-line calculators etc. It’s just so easy to use and very fast to do anything I’d want with a calculator. If I need graphing I’ll reach for Desmos. If I need algebra I’ll use Sage. I haven’t used Sage since my undergrad, however.

[1] https://www.casio.com/content/dam/casio/product-info/locales...

[2] https://www.casio.com/ca-en/scientific-calculators/product.F...

Rant/Aside: Smartphones (or at least Android) are just generally really bad at being... smart, especially out of the box. No dictionary? No thesaurus? To say nothing of built-in encyclopedia (e.g. Wikipedia). Calculator worse than the $1 scientific ones? It's astounding how obvious it is that they're meant to dumb people down and just sell you crap when you look at the complete absence of basic functionality anyone from 50+ years ago might expect them to have.

Many tests will not allow you to use a smartphone. My son couldn't even use the school issued chromebook on his PSAT, he had to get a loaner Windows laptop or use an approved hard calculator.

However to answer your question: phone rules in classrooms vary enormously and the dedicated calculator is faster to interface when you're drilling problems in a homework setting

I finished highschool in the (gasp) 20th century so the modern classroom is certainly something I've had to learn

Do you think you could remember most of Z80 ASM? I looked at some old ASM I wrote long ago, and it's hard to follow the logic of the program, since most lines are messing around with the registers. But basics like 'ld hl,xyz' and 'jp/jnz' still make sense.

You previously acknowledged it's a "very captive market" that you "would've expected Texas Instruments to try gouging" :) "$160 is what the very captive market will bear until the state-sanctioned gouging backfires" is a less compelling argument.

"Shrug" is kind of gross. Seems like you're being reflexively cynical.

Edit: to be clear the problem here is really local school boards being antidemocratic and unaccountable, not TI being greedy.

I would love to play something like that again on my phone.

No, I was too scared to ask.

My Casio could do numeric differentiation and integration. I used this to double check my answers in my exams.

In fact, it still can as I still own and use it to this day.

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.)

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...

Four data points is sufficient to give you a 'good enough' shape and position of a second-degree polynomial. Five or six for a third-degree one. (And you barely see them, and don't learn how to algebraically solve for their roots in high school anyways, because the cubic factoring formula is a pig.)

If you can't tell what a function's plotted shape is going to be at a glance, you haven't learned the material to the degree expected of an attentive child.

With phone emulation, I probably need half a calculator. I have three.

There are plenty of things in the world for me to spend my limited supply of outrage on. Calculator pricing doesn't make it into the top 100.

However.

The entire year, your textbooks, your teacher, your in-class practice, was walking you through the specific commands you need to select to actually do the things, like graphing and solving.

If little Timmy is unable to read the manual about how to do math he doesn't yet know with whatever his specific calculator is, he is at a severe disadvantage, and the teacher basically cannot help him.

A friend in high school bucked the trend and used a casio in our TI based education, and did just fine for himself, but he was apparently a smart kid.

I find when you learn things at 15 they tend to stick around. (Stuff I learned last week, not so much!) Even just looking at your example, I remembered that HL is a 16 bit register and you can split it into two 8 bit registers H and L if you want. I think most of it would come back; I wrote quite a lot of it, both for the TI-83 and later for a Z80 that I bought and put on a breadboard and wired up to some RAM and EEPROM, about as bare metal as it gets.

> most lines are messing around with the registers

Isn’t that just the nature of assembly? :)

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/

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.

In the exam, you'd also be at a disadvantage without advanced graphing.

Maybe everything is possible on the Casio, but it’s so much clearer on the NumWorks (especially for eg. Physics questions, where you might want to retrieve values you calculated earlier with full precision, etc). Genuinely felt like a cheat code when I was in highschool. I showed mine to my teacher and they swapped the whole’s schools standard calculators from the Ti-84 CE to the NumWorks, which is cheaper too.

Personally, I found great enjoyment in coming up with more and more involved plots in the Polar and Parametric modes, where yes I would predict what a graph would look like and then go over to see it. And then go back and iterate. Etc. Until I was painting pictures with functions and had a far greater understanding of the domain than I’d wager anyone who thinks graphing calculations are for finding roots of polynomials could imagine.

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.

It is not nonsense. I'll draft an example.

Any second degree polynomial is a parabola that is either pointing up (positive a term), or down (negative a term). That term is an indication of how curved it is.

-b/2a is the X coordinate of the parabola's inflection point.

Plug that value into the equation and it'll give you the Y coordinate.

You now know the inflection point of the parabola, you know which way it points, and how steep it is, and exactly where the polynomial's roots should live (and whether or not it has any real ones!). If you remember what the squares of 0.5, 1, and 2 are, you can now connect the dots on a 'pretty good' plot.

This took yuo longer to read than it takes to do.

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Similar transformations can be applied to sine waves, root functions, exponentials, logarithms, and reciprocals.

If you can't do this, or don't understand how to do this, you have not learned and understood the material. If all you've learnt is how to plug the formula into a magic $160 box to look at the pretty picture, and how to ask it to solve for roots, you and your teachers have wasted your time. The point of all this isn't looking at plots, the point is understanding how you can manipulate these equations, and what these manipulations do to them. This should all be drilled to the point of being intuitive.

Anything so complicated that basic algebraic manipulations won't get you the rough shape in seconds of work... Is more complicated than a high schooler is taught to solve.

I mean what do these do? I think like 10 digits worth?

If you're actually doing something requiring over 10 digits of accuracy and you can reliably hit that you probably have a $10 million lab...

So honestly what are we talking about here...If it's pure mathematics this is a bad tool for that as well.

TBH, in the house I mount them ground down, but under cabinets or in the garage/shop or etc I mount it ground up.

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

edit: Not code, just convention.

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.