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Comment by roland35 | Hacker News Reader

I am not a fan of the lobbying side of this story, but I do think that the TI graphing calculators are good products. They are very durable and easy to use. I fondly remember programming a multiplayer poker game in TI-BASIC on a road trip complete with a CPU player! I also would browse TIcalc.org to look for new games and utilities.

I later bought a TI-89 Titanium which opened up the gaming possibilities! Check out square-z for a fun tetris-like game

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The problem is they're selling you (for a TI-83+) an outdated 6 MHz Z80 processor for $100 when a modern 48 MHz ARM Cortex M0 with more memory only costs about $1. If the market was more competitive, graphing calculators would be about $20 and would graph 10x faster (and my TI-83+ was pretty slow to graph).

Graphing calculators weren't part of any math classes I took, but my first experience with programming was TI-BASIC on a used TI-86. Programming a PC wasn't really an option, but the small calculator felt personal and a lot less intimidating. It had an obvious place to start from and included all the software you needed! Of course I mostly used it to play games other people wrote, so much that I eventually had to get an 89 for the better TI-BASIC, TIGCC and all the software people made with it. I wish I learned about the GP32 sooner.

I agree that they are super durable. My kids are now using the same calculator that I used in high school in the late 90s.

Very cool :) My road-trip project was Connect-4.

A couple of my more ambitious friends got into Z80 assembly, which was super helpful for them down the road.

In High School, I recall that I built a random maze generator in TI-BASIC, added a really basic movable sprite, and slowly added some very simple/dumb RPG mechanics to push it towards becoming a terrible roguelike.

(One of those lost HS projects it would be fun to revisit but the code was lost when the calculator itself suffered a factory resetting memory/power glitch due to a static electricity discharge event in some College move or another.)

That's what I did! I fell in love with the Z80.

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