This Website is hosted on an Casio fx-9750GII Calculator | Hacker News Reader

This Website is hosted on an Casio fx-9750GII Calculator

fxip.as203478.net

872 pointsmritzmann253 comments

Wayback link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210712193555/http://fxip.as203...

In case it goes down: https://archive.is/5a44i

Last year I bought I used TI for my daughter who needed it for school. I got her the oldest version, the one which takes AAA batteries and communicates with the outside world through a serial link. A project like this brings to mind the possibility of stuffing a Raspberry Pi Zero in the battery compartment, hooking it up to the school WiFi, using a terminal app on the calculator to communicate with the Pi and in that way voiding the whole reason of using these ancient beasts in the first place. I won't do this of course - she's there to learn other things besides refining the art of cheating [1] - but it would be a tempting hack. An even more elaborate hack would be to replace the guts of the thing with a Zero running a TI emulator as well as some more useful stuff like ssh. The possibilities are endless... so endless in fact that I'm fairly certain this has been done already, somewhere.

[1] which in my days at school consisted of writing the translated works of Homer on a 10x10cm piece of paper, a good way to a) learn to write incredibly small and b) get those words to stick inside your head long enough so you don't actually need to consult the cheat "sheet" during the test.

The ESP-01 is smaller, cheaper, less battery heavy, and already speaks serial so it wouldn't be hard to integrate it, just for the WiFi... And at a quick look there's a bunch of TI<->Arduino stuff out there in the wild it should be easy.

There are many ways to flay this hog, this is more of a thought experiment than a recipe for a TI-CH337. The ultimate hack would be to use a more modern version (with "high-res" screen) and replace/amend the guts with something which emulates the calculator - wabbitemu seems to work just fine [1] - but can also function in other ways. Add some key combination to switch functions and you have a mean lean cheatin' machine.

[1] http://wabbitemu.org/

Reminds me of when I was in high school. I found a terminal emulator for my HP48G, built a serial cable to connect it to my 2400 baud modem. I was able to use it to check my email in physics class. Of course I was only able to do that once; the modem was three or four times the size of the calculator with lots of blinkenlights on it, and trailing a phone cable half way across the classroom isn’t very subtle.

Here someone figured out how to drive the LCD screen from one. https://ripitapart.com/2013/03/02/making-use-of-an-old-ti-83...

I found it a lot of fun to interface with the TI calculators directly using the wonderful ArTICL Arduino library[0]. You can cobble together a link cable to imitate another calculator and hook it up to your microcontroller of choice.

I enjoyed making a QWERTY keyboard and news app over WiFi using the tiny ESP-01 (as, coincidentally, @shakna suggested in this thread).

0: https://github.com/KermMartian/ArTICL

There's enough hacks you can do on the 83/84 without hardware gutting tricks. Even in plain old TI Basic. You can easily automate most of a HS curriculum and make an unbeatable tic tac toe program, no internet needed. Its honestly the first coding experience I ever had.

One of my proudest cheats was cramming the keywords of an entire presentation in French on a tiny round piece of paper, stuck to the glass of my wrist watch, so I could literally cheat while the whole class and teacher were watching me. Somehow I actually got away with multiple glances, only receiving a single remark about "being a bit too focused on the duration of my presentation".

My cousin, who has always did have good entrepreneurial instincts, actually managed to turn a decent profit selling highly detailed printouts of micro cheatsheets at school.

How is having the transcript of the presentation cheating and not just being prepared?

It's because school is preparing students for life, where it would be outrageous to have written notes while presenting or speaking. What's next, someone else writing the words for you?

Whats next, paying someone in a poorer country to write your things for you while you 'work from home'

Yeeeah that's already being done for a a bunch of IT courses. Check out some of those "freelance work" sites, it's fairly obvious a bunch of those are someone's homework...

It's because school is preparing students for life, where they would never have any chance to look anything up, and could thus only use their own memory.

And that "you won't always have a calculator with you" thing math teachers loved so much? Yeah that didn't age well.

How exactly is it outrageous? You are there to deliver the message in a meaningful way, not to recite such message from memory. This is no theater or the cinema where you are playing a role and must be entirely authentic as a result.

Sure, literally reading entire thing from your notes in front of your audience is bad form as it fails to build the captivating presentation. It is just distracting for those listening.

But damn if this cannot ever work for the online presentation where the speaker isn't visible.

The parent was being sarcastic.

In the same way that my ability to use WolframAlpha to answer physics questions in no way qualifies me to say “black holes don’t sound like they could work, surely the way the in-falling particles get an increasingly well defined velocity as they reach the event horizon causes their position to become increasingly undefined until they are almost certainly nowhere near the black hole?”, which is the kind of thing I tend to say because I don’t have a physics degree, and given how physicists generally respond when I say stuff like this there’s a 5% chance I’ve said something interesting and a 95% chance I’m as wrong as 90s Hollywood script writers were about computers.

That’s interesting but I don’t understand how it’s at all similar.

With sufficient preparation I could pass any physics test without actually understanding physics. A Chinese room within the mind, if you prefer a philosophy reference.

Thinking about it, I really should’ve gone with that analogy first — it keeps this in the category of languages.

I know you pulled it out of your ass, but your thought on the uncertainty principle and black holes is actually intriguing. A wave function that is fully localized in momentum space (as in has one definite momentum) has to be maximally spread in position space (as in its possible positions are diluted to the point of being everywhere so the odds of observing it anywhere are effectively zero).

IIRC some quantum properties like uncertainty have funny ways of being preserved in relativity. They pop out of the equations as unexpectedly nice coincidences, but they feel to good to be true. Like they clearly hint at some profound truth, but its on the tip of everyone's tongue yet no one can grab it.

I vaguely recall certain types of entanglement change in an interesting way under the Lorentz transform (don't hold me to that).

I searched WolframAalpha and I can tell you you are partially right. The universe macroscopically is flat so they remain in proximity to the black hole on the x,y dimensions but move arbitrarily far on the z dimension, which is how they bend spacetime and why they attract everything around them like if they have gravity. :-)

It was not allowed to use notes on your presentation in this class. It was a very demanding school.

The curriculum for French was to learn everything you learn on a normal school in the first two years and then spend the next 4 learning more.

And if IT use the Cisco management console, they get the location down to 3-7m diameter of every WiFi, Bluetooth, Microwave ++ that is using the same band as WiFi.

I was earlier in a startup that made an indoor navigation map, where you could get the blue dot without installing anything, by using this Cisco feature: https://use.mazemap.com

What is maze map showing me? What is this?

Feels incredibly strange that anyone can publicly view all these office layouts, down to very specific room/corridor/stair layouts, occupancy status, of random private office and university buildings...

My school let you have two calculators so you could have notes on one of them and use the other. I don't really understand why, I'd rather just have paper notes. Fun things to play with though, the HP38G's we had had a nifty infrared communication thing so you could trade stuff with other people.

I cheatet so much with my TI. In every class we were allowed to use a calculator I would literally code everything relevant for the test into this small thingy. I still think I better memorized some of the things as my class mates.

Also I loved how it doesn't really communicate except with a cable no one had. So nobody expected me to share my 'cheats'

You accidentally prepared for the test while thinking that you were cheating.

I did both I guess. And because I could not share it, teachers never bothered.

This gives me food for thought. I have young children, all under 10. The challenge is learning how to inspire them; you found a crutch that made learning less of a chore: converting the syllabus into chunks of code.

I can already see that the my two eldest will both need very different answers, but if I can figure out what theirs is, I can hopefully help them focus where my childhood mind would wander during study sessions.

You sound like a good parent. For me finding these small ways to cope with the boring reality of schooling really made the difference

"I cheated in the finals of my metaphysics exam. I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me"

-- Woody Allen

Just reminded me.

One of my university teachers allowed us a double sided letter sized piece of paper during the exam and we could put whatever we felt like on it.

This was brilliant because 1. In real life, you don’t memorize random facts. That’s what reference books and the internet is for. 2. Making the cheat sheet actually forced us to understand the material so they we could sum it up and for it on the page. By the time we were done writing the sheet, we had memorized most of it anyway.

Yet another demonstration how school is completely out of touch with the jobs they’re claiming to be preparing you for.

I had an Econ teacher that did something similar but it was a note card. Thing was she reused the same bank of questions every semester and provided a study packet of sample questions that was a super set of the questions on the final. Some kids got wind of this and encoded the answers to the study packet on the index card. They were bizarrely accused of cheating.

I know someone who did something similar in analog electronics. The teacher asked them to come to their office, and asked them a few questions. As the student couldn't answer them, the perfect score was commuted into a failing grade.

Regardless of how you approach this, an exam is here to evaluate your level of proficiency on the topic at hand. If you sidestep this, that would be called cheating.

A university teacher allowed us to use everything during the exam, including a laptop with an internet connection. The only rule was that you weren't allowed to use any communication with other people, like messaging someone or asking questions on forums. Needless to say, everyone passed that exam.

For myself, the most-hated part of every exam session was having to memorize everything. That's what made me fail every single exam I've ever failed. I just can't bring myself to stuff information into my head and then give it back later. It's not a storage device. Yet most other teachers insisted that I need to do everything from memory. 95% of my school and university "education" was to memorize something, then recite it, and then forget it forever.

I've done open-everything exams (just no collaboration) and my experience was that it didn't change the mean grade, but it did increase the standard deviation. Students who were already mostly on top of the material could look things up and double-check their work, so their scores improved. Meanwhile, students who didn't really know what they needed to spent the whole time trying to find "the answer" in the book or online (and that's not the way programming tests work!), so in the end they either left the answer blank or put something totally nonsensical, copy-pasted off the internet. In a closed-book test, they would have at least tried to figure it out on their own, and maybe gotten a few partial-credit points.

> I just can't bring myself to stuff information into my head and then give it back later. It's not a storage device.

Funny, I thought that's pretty much exactly what it is.

> 95% of my school and university "education" was to memorize something, then recite it, and then forget it forever.

Did anyone actually order you to forget anything? I don't think that part was mandatory.

I had a couple teachers that allowed the cheat sheet, and it worked so well that I made them for every test, whether I could actually use them on the test or not. As you noted, it's such a great forcing function to identify and understand the most important bits.

The author seems to have their own AS for "experimentation purposes" https://tbspace.de/as203478tbspacenetworks.html

https://bgp.he.net/AS203478

https://www.peeringdb.com/net/10981

I've always been interested in doing something like this, although it's prohibitively expensive for me, even for IPv6-only.

It can be relatively inexpensive, depending on which RIR you’re using. There are providers like [Neptune Networks](https://neptunenetworks.org/) or [Vultr](https://www.vultr.com/) that you can peer with from a VPS so you don’t need to get “proper” IP transit in a datacenter.

Oh, interesting -- I assumed you had to have a membership to the RIR directly (APNIC in my case, which would have been upwards of 1000AUD/month). Hmm... Thanks!

APNICs info seems to show AUD 1180/year, not per month? Includes one ASN, one /24 on v4 and a /48 on v6. It's still significant, but not crazy.

Oh, you're right. 1180AUD / year + 500AUD sign-up fee.. Still a bit expensive. If I had a business use case for it I'd be able to justify it, but it's too much for a hobby, unfortunately.

This actually doesn't seem that bad for a hobby (I'd be using this almost as a fee to help me learn more about networking).

Does APNIC give out ASes for hobbyist and experimental use?

You "just" need to be in their reigon, and have justification. Usual justification is that you have two upstream networks and they'll announce your prefixes (generally with BGP). That's going to cost some more money, but there's specialist VPSes for this these days.

There’s no hobbyist program but neither is it corporate/for-profit only, from what I see.

There are few people(mostly network engineers or researchers by trade and/or business owners themselves) who are assigned ASN to their homelab gears from JPNIC. Knowing the right doors to knock etc.

Good to know. Thanks

i got my V6 and V4 space, along with my ASN though Hostus.us (https://my.hostus.us/cart.php?gid=55). I use Vultr and a few other providers. For V6 only, you can get the ASN and V6 space for around $50 per year, and the vultr server is around $5 per month... my own ASN is under https://as204994.net with links to some providers and details...

I never would have come across this myself when doing very cursory research. One step closer... Thanks!

Excuse my ignorance, but how do you peer on public ixps through Vultr? Do you have physical presence there?

I walked through doing this with my AS (AS398328) in the US (ARIN), both for fun and for security research. Happy to chat with anyone who wants to go through the process, it was probably $1-2k in total for ARIN fees to get the AS and v4/v6 space. Real transit is a lot worse though.

1-2k is a bit tough for testing the water. But above there is another $50 one. One wonder what is the difference as $50 is very manageable!

going direct to ARIN/RIPE/APNIC etc have some stricter rules (IIRC, in RIPE you need a company or possibly business, plus a bank account in that name). by going for somone like HostUs, they are sponsoring the account, so they need to verify you and ask questions, then setup the ASN, etc. Also, going direct will provide you with V4/V6 space allocations. They might charge a yearly fee (IIRC, its like 50 per allocation) but v6 is "practally" free but V4 will be a in a wait list... Finally, going direct, there is some sort of "kick back"... if the RIR makes more money than it cost to run the place, they reallocate fees back to the LIRs... so, you some times get money back... I have been tempted, but for RIPE, its 1400 per year, plus 2k setup... ouch...

[EDIT] bit more on the RIPE fees: https://www.ripe.net/participate/member-support/payment/ripe...

I have my personal LIR with RIPE and they do allow signing up as an LIR without being a company. As an individual you need to provide proof of identity via government issued ID and pay 17% Dutch VAT.

When I signed up I got a /22 of V4 space and /29 of v6 space, although for new signups I believe there's now a wait list to get a /24 and that's it for V4.

Yeah, AFAIK the LIR model is specific to RIPE. The ARIN team does seem to put a decent amount of work into vetting and support/etc with pleasant interactions, so I don't think the fees are too unreasonable (but maybe not the best idea as an individual).

Check out the dn42 community if you simply want to play with the tech stack for free. The network uses the private AS range, allocates addresses from the private address ranges and peering happens over point-to-point VPN links.

See https://dn42.eu

Notice: this is written in fairly nicely-written C, not ASM with demoscene level micro-optimizations, like you might expect.

Goes to show how much you can get out of hardware just by writing code sensibly in a native language (and native libs/tools, of course).

C isn't in my mind close to the metal but potentially lets you be more sympathetic to the metal. Thanks for your drawing attention to this, I'm looking forward to reading.

Well, at the very least it's close in that it's native compiled (and not in a very abstracted way like JIT languages mostly are).

C like any other language, also has JITs and scripting implementations to chose from.

WASM, MSIL, Tendra, TIMI are all examples of JIT/AOT implementation that have C (or C++) as part of their source languages.

> Goes to show how much you can get out of hardware just by writing code sensibly in a native language (and native libs/tools, of course).

Personally, I find this a far less impressive demo of the SuperH SH-4 CPU than, say, Doom running on a graphical calculator. A http server (not https) simply opens sockets, writes a string, and closes the socket, a task which is usually purely I/O bound. Implement something basic like HTTPS (introduced in 1994) and watch this CPU grind to a halt.

I agree with the feeling, it's not really that impressive, but the HTTPS mention isn't accurate. Performance would be certainly lower, but remember the SH-4 was in the Dreamcast.

You can buy some niche boards[0] with SH-4, and I assure you, they can run Debian and they do SSL just fine.

[0]https://www.apnet.co.jp/product/superh/

My experience in 8-bit is you can write 80% in C and then just focus and optimise the bits that need it in assembly. The rule is the same as ever, don't prematurely optimise (i.e. by writing everything in assembly), but the amount that needs optimisation is a bit bigger.

This is really inspiring as I have been eyeing my smart electric utility meter as the perfect candidate for running my portofolio website.

Make sure you set your TTLs high enough to account for the occasional late meter reading.

Well Casios are better than TI calculators.

My current favorite calculator is Casio ES-115 PLUS2

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

I like it because when you enter sin(pi/12) you get (sqrt(3)-1)/(2*sqrt(2)) in mathematical notation, which is really nice for a $16 calculator.

Here I'm going to hurt TI: If you need a TI-84 or TI-89 for school, the place to get them cheap is shopgoodwill.com:

https://www.shopgoodwill.com/Listings?st=ti-84%20plus&sg=&c=...

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

Thank you so much for pointing out fx-115ES PLUS2! I looked for a good hour yesterday trying to find an alternative to the fx-115ES PLUS (first edition) with the same features, after Casio discontinued the original. I'm honestly embarrassed that I had overlooked this...

I do absolutely agree that Casio calculators are just wholly better than TI in general. Their menu driven interface is a game changer for me back in middle school. TI-36X Pro felt cumbersome and confusing, while fx-115ES was much more intuitive.

They're amazing little machines. I have a predecessor to that model, whose battery still works since purchased new for my school year starting in 2000. It's not solar-charged, either.

I really don't understand why Casio keeps changing the entire design of their calculators, though.

they don't; they have multiple lines which don't change much generation to generation.

a casual observer might think that they can't pick a design.

I’m not sure I understand. The calculator linked is the second version of that model, which to my understanding is identical software wise but looks completely different.

TI is pretty clearly just coasting on being the one mandated by a lot of schools; there's no way you can justify them still costing like $100 and having the same capabilities as when I was in high school.

The new ones have rechargeable batteries, color screens, USB, and Python. So, only a decade out of date.

TI still use really outdated hardware (some ARM9 thing) on their high-end nSpire models.

With the same price even HP Prime G2 has way better hardware (NXP iMX6ULL, Cortex-A7, 256MB DDR3, USB EHCI OTG) and wide software spectrum (no Secure Boot enforced.) I've put full scale Linux and Windows ARM (arm32 IoT) on that platform.

Fun Fact: New Arm 9 chips are still coming out to this day. They are the highest performing Arm chips that feature generic external bus interfaces.

I searched for graphing calculator apps on iOS the other day and found a ton that simply attempt to recreate the TI-84, e.g. [1].

So anyone with high school kids: are they still buying $100 physical calculators? Or are they just using free/cheap apps?

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/graphing-calculator-x84/id1247...

I'm a few years out of high school, but during my time anything other than physical calculators were explicitly banned due to the potential for kids to be accessing the internet during exams. I even had a friend who won one of TI's higher end calculators at a math competition, only for him to be banned to use it during exams because of its higher capabilities. Perhaps things have changed in the post-Covid world.

In my high school physics and math classes, we were allowed to run any programs that we programmed ourselves. This was on Ti-84s so BASIC not Python.

Given the context, it made a lot of sense.

Yeah about the same here. I wrote some programs to handle quadratic formulas. Impressed the Algebra teacher who then let me take AP Computer Science so I can learn to program in Java...which I promptly forgot after graduating HS.

When I was in HS, at the exams we were expected to use our TI-84+ calculators, but we were not allowed to have any programs of our own, so they made us clear the programs before they handed out the problems.

Which you could work around by archiving and then unarchiving the programs. I remember having to do a soft factory reset for one class before exams, rather than just clearing programs. At least they took the policy to its logical extension

Just graduated secondary school in April. Just as a someone said in a reply below, anything other than a physical calculator is still banned during assessments. There are tools like Desmos, GeoGebra, etc... that may be used by the instructor and students during lessons though. Although it's strange, there is no explicit rule provided by our Mathematics faculty that bans higher functioning calculators I've only seen one person carrying one.

There's no way they let you take the SAT with your phone out. Acceptable calculators are actually enumerated though there's more than I realized. https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/taking-the-tes...

I'm really surprised that the open source NumWorks calculator is on that list! Also the RadioShack / Casio EC-4033 programmable from the 1980s...

That's what I did 10 years ago when my TI-89 broke right before my Linear Algebra final. I somehow convinced my instructor that when I had my phone out, I was actually using the calculator on my phone.

Oppositely here in Japan (where Casio locates), high school students usually don't use calculators on math/physics classes.

That's interesting and somewhat surprising to me. Do they use slide rules and/or function value tables printed on paper?

Not sure about Japan but in Poland the variables in problems are either symbolic and you solve it symbolically, or if they are given as values then they are usually chosen just right to not make arithmetic much of a bother (that actually results in a fun 'sanity check' that if you start getting something waaay crazier than 'normal' you double check if you didn't screw something up somewhere along the way or if there is a better way to solve it).

But everyone is taught to only substitute variables for values at the very, very end so calculators are not needed at all. At some point in education there is no point in testing arithmetic skills over and over again, the problems and the methods of finding out solutions to them are what matters

Exactly, same in the UK. So a typical first question in the maths exam we take at age 14/15 might be ‘Factorise the quadratic x²+5x+6’. No calculator needed.

Almost same as Japan. If we need calculation (like for some physics exam), we use column method on paper.

That makes sense. If you used a calculator's computer algebra system (CAS) for the symbolic manipulation, it would certainly count as cheating.

We were allowed to use calculators when I took my school exams in the uk. But our exam questions often asked us to give the answers in surds i.e 3/4*√2 not as a decimal which our calculators couldn’t do then. Our teachers told us there would never be a question where the answer couldn’t be expressed cleanly using either fractions or surds, that we should practice doing the maths and show our workings on the exam paper and that if we were using a calculator we were wasting time doing data entry as the actual addition / division / subtraction would never be hard enough to justify it. We memorised a table of surds for 30º 45º and 60º angles but I’ve forgotten why now. Also they hard reset our calculators as we went into the exam.

>Well Casios are better than TI calculators.

Agreed. For basic maths, the best scientific calculator is the fx83. The ES 115 is based on it. The graphics and controls and navigation is really good. Nothing comes close.

"This website is hosted on a Casio..."

Not anymore it isn't.

I really enjoy the HP calculators. RPN is much closer to how my brain perceives the equations.

Unfortunately they seem to have abandoned it on their newer models: I recently got a HP Prime and no RPN in sight afaict (https://www.hp.com/us-en/campaigns/prime-graphing-calculator...) .

Sure there is. Go to Settings and move down to Entry. Hit Enter and you get your choice of Textbook, Algebraic, or RPN. Go down to RPN, press Enter and then Esc.

Presto, RPN.

Thank you - I used the calculator more in the last hour after making this change than I had in the past month. I'm ashamed I didn't figure this out - I should have done a better job of RTM.

Checking in with a TI-30X Pro and get the equivalent (sqrt(6)-sqrt(2))/4 also in mathematical notation. All of my work is saved when I turn the calculator back on. Plus I can just set a flag for imaginary mode without a separate complex app so everything works the same in both modes. The screen is higher resolution and the multi-tap entry is pretty darn sweet.

Annoyingly TI-30X Pro is Europe only (also costs more, but looks better quality and design)... but you are right, it looks pretty good, as does the US-available TI-36X Pro. I will give one a try. My main gripe with TI is the school requirement for the TI-84 series.

Must be a market specific model, because that one shows up for me in the .com tld but not in the regional one :-(

But from there I've started digging and they have so many different models with similar appearances... Anyone knows the difference between fx-82ES and fx-82SPXII?

FX-115ES Plus-2 is the model for the USA market. For other countries the same device (but in another color) goes by FX-991ES Plus-2.

https://www.casio.com/sg/scientific-calculators/product.FX-9...

Thanks!! The naming is so confusing... How are we supposed to know that "115ES" and "991ES" are in fact the same thing?

> Well Casios are better than TI calculators.

For scientific calculators, I would agree. For graphing calculators they might be better on technical merit or cost, but everyone is going to write programs for the TI so you might as well get that one.

Not everyone, TI seems to be US thing due to the government agreements.

I never owned one, and got three generations of scientific programmable CASIO calculators.

It was either that or HP ones, as TI were pretty much ignored in Portugal.

I don't know what TI ever did to you, but I know that I would not cross you lightly.

They're exploiting an effective monopoly position (through schools mandating their usage). I can see that being enough of a reason to push back against that.

Correction: was hosted on an Casio fx-9750GII Calculator.

They also built a serial adapter that connects to a dial-up modem: https://youtu.be/epFX8K0dhdY

And an IRC client: https://youtu.be/afkrucsMMrc

Hm, maybe posting this to HN wasn't the best idea...?

Maybe we'll get a follow-up on hosting a distributed cluster of casios to handle global load balancing

lol

AWS Casio as a service.

c4s?

Nawww, You'd want to call it Casiopeia (sic).

Perhaps vertically scaling this on a Casio FX-CG50PRIZM is an option?

op just need to add some cache servers in front of it and it'll be fine, impressive

Back in my day it was a Beowulf cluster running on hot grits serving Natalie Portman pictures

Oh man, Beowulf clusters, I forgot all about those. How come we never hear about them anymore?

I'm guessing because recurring one-liners don't do as well here as they did on SlashDot.

"Running MPI programs on a cluster of commodity hardware" was perhaps a sufficiently novel idea to warrant a unique name back in the 90s, but these days it's more or less the standard for all but the most exotic and expensive of scientific computing... and even those expensive custom supercomputers tend to still be x86 processors running MPI code.

Basically you don't hear about them any more because it's all Beowulf clusters now.

I think the "Beowulf" name (the name of the first well known computer cluster) was mostly a Slashdot meme. As Slashdot faded, so did the name "Beowulf".

Because now they're just clusters. Lots of people make hobby ones out of rpi's to tinker with

Those are Brambles: https://elinux.org/Bramble

This is why I originally got an odroid-c1 instead. IIRC newer rpi don't run Ethernet over the USB bus, so there's more bandwidth available.

Inferno is available for Nintendo DS, more info at https://gamebrew.org/wiki/Inferno_DS I can verify that it runs, at least, on a Nintendo DSi, though I never actually did anything with it and didn't have another DSi (or enough knowledge) to find out if it could actually network.

I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

In case it completely dies there are archives now available:

http://web.archive.org/web/20210712193555/http://fxip.as2034...

https://archive.is/5a44i

Or the whole thing is small enough to fit in a comment:

  > GET / HTTP/1.1
  > Host: fxip.as203478.net
  > User-Agent: curl/7.76.1
  > Accept: */*
  > 
  * Mark bundle as not supporting multiuse
  * HTTP 1.0, assume close after body
  < HTTP/1.0 200 OK
  < Server: uIP/1.0 http://www.sics.se/~adam/uip/
  < Connection: close
  < Content-type: text/html
  < 
  <!DOCTYPE html>
  <html>
  <head>
   <title>Casio fx-9750GII Webserver</title>
   <link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Lato&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">
   <style type="text/css">
    * {
     margin: 0;
     padding: 0; 
    }
  
    *:focus 
    {
     outline: none; 
    }
  
    *::-moz-focus-inner 
    {
     border: 0; 
    }
  
    body 
    {
     background: #fafafa;
     font-family: "Lato", sans-serif;
     font-size: 100%; 
     text-align: center;
    }
  
    a 
    {
     color: #0075BF; }
     a:not(:hover):not(:focus):not(:active) {
     text-decoration: none;
    }
  
  </style>
  </head>
  <body>
   <br>
   <h1>Casio fx-9750GII Webserver</h1><br>
   Welcome! 
   This page is hosted on an Casio fx-9750GII graphical calculator, running a SuperH SH4 processor.<br>
   It's running a port of the uIP TCP/IP stack, using SLIP over the 3pin 2.5mm serial port.<br>
   <br>
   <a href="https://github.com/Manawyrm/fxIP" target="_blank">Firmware (uIP port, webserver implementation)</a>
   <br><br>
   <img src="https://screenshot.tbspace.de/vfscewyjzir.jpg" style="width: 700px;"><br>
   <img src="https://screenshot.tbspace.de/ijlnydgsvkw.jpg" style="width: 700px;"><br>
   <i>(these pictures are not hosted on the calculator.)</i>
   <br><br>
  </body>
  </html

Thanks.

So most of the content (images, font) is hosted elsewhere ...

of course just like with most places using content providers :) . It would take forever (relatively)to pull those off the casio vs the html text for the page.

    *:focus 
    {
     outline: none; 
    }
  
    *::-moz-focus-inner 
    {
     border: 0; 
    }

Wow, the equivalent of having a building with existing wheelchair ramps and ripping them out because they're "unsightly".

I guess it's a valid decision decision, but pretty crappy for anyone who needs them.

is that to imply that focus outline is meant for accessibility purposes?

Yes, focus rectangles are an essential component of navigating the interface with the keyboard.

Fair. But if a user has accessibility enabled, that should override the css itself no?

Also even with the focus outline disabled on other sites, I am able to navigate with the keyboard to text input fields. OP's site doesn't have any input fields so not sure why they have that CSS in place as I don't think it's doing anything.

You are making the assumption that the user has some modicum of control over the browser's configuration.

No I am not. Users who require accessibility have it setup in their MacOS/Windows settings. It's a global setting for them. It's not website specific.

Users may access the site through a third-party device that they cannot configure, for example in a kiosk setting.

I mean we are talking about a demo project on hosting a tiny site on a calculator. Don't think anyone is trying to access it from a kiosk.

But if your comment is a general opinion of websites in general, then yea, I see what you mean.

No, it will not override the CSS (not sure what you mean by "accessibility enabled" exactly).

> even with the focus outline disabled on other sites, I am able to navigate with the keyboard to text input fields

Correct, but for a user with vision problems, the focus outline lets them see what has focus. CSS doesn't stop them from inputting values.

Focus styles are essential and should not be removed as a best practice (in general, this is a very small site).

Still hanging in there so far! Bit slow, but still faster than cnn.com for me.

Slow load, but after a minute it worked for me. Pretty cool!

Yeah. I assumed it was hugged to death. But it does load. Albeit slowly.

One of the few hn times when I try and load it still actually works, impressive little thing!

The author's blog has a lot of interesting projects, though I did not find a writeup on this one. https://tbspace.de/

Is this Casio colocated in a Hetzner datacenter?

maybe he has reverse proxy to house because no public ip with ports for hosting?

I would argue it's not really hosted on the Casio then, since it's only static content the reverse proxy cache would hit 100% every time, except on TTL.

Maybe it's just a forwarding setup with no caching?

It is cheaper than AWS's Casio as a Service and for small sites you barely notice the difference.

Then again AWS's Casio as a Service is available in a HIPAA compliant form.

Actually, HIPAA auditors would probably love a webserver running on a Casio since the hardware can be closely vetted and won't randomly change.

If you use an an alt-CaaS you'll won't benefit from Infinidash integration, but then again you won't have the Infinidash configuration learning curve to deal with so it could still end up a net positive.

Sure, but with fixed hardware resources you risk the site going down with traffic spikes like this, with AWS you have access to calculatorless options that can easily scale to handle increased request volume.

Is that their competing product offering to match virtualizaled calculators delivered by hyperdivisor?

Pen and paper!

> AWS's Casio as a Service

AWS Cassiopeia

Now I want to see a website hosted by my favorite graphing calculator, the one that comes with the best UX for operating on numbers - RPN (Reverse Polish Notation). HP-48G

Thanks for reminding me that I used to play Columns and other games on my HP during math class.

Did this get the hug of death?

It looks like it may have briefly - but it loaded great for me.

Loaded for me!

(Meanwhile, I got a "Can't serve requests that fast" from HN when I first tried to reply.)

Looks like it's time to upgrade to a Casio server!

All startups soon learn the importance of running server grade casios in production.

The calculator likely exploded

The little engine that could(n't)

this is like firing the death star at a plucky little pod racer

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in curiosity and one was suddenly silenced."

Why did I click on this expecting a calculator out of all the possible servers would withstand HN's hug of death? Smart of the commenters here archiving it before it inevitably went down

Because static pages on a calculator likely to be more reliable and faster than whatever hipster stack is popular running on some VC funded pile of compute power across all of Amazon's datacenters.

FWIW I still saw the link at #1, clicked it almost in exasperation after seeing it at the top of HN all day, and was pleasantly surprised to see it load. Bravo, little calculator.

Looks like the Casio is not web scale :)

They just need to add a casio load balancer.

Better response times than other websites I browse… maybe they should upgrade to Casios.

down for me.

I wonder whether it would be fast if it ran some ancient web technology, such as CGI, .Net frameworks for the web or Filemaker web.

I strongly suspect the webpage is entirely static and trying to run any sort of modern serverside framework would make it wail in protest - some simple dynamic elements using the native script might be doable though. It'd be neat to see if they could get a page counter up - just a dumb one that blindly increments the counter whenever any visit occurs.

Maybe we should all skip cloud platfoms and CDNs and buy a bunch of Casios instead.

How many Casios can you fit in a U1 rack?

The calculator's dimensions are: 21.3 x 87.5 x 180.5mm

A 1U rack comes in various depths, let's assume 1m (1000mm), and the width between rails is about 450mm. 1U is around 44mm in height.

So in 1U, you could stack them 2 high, 5 wide, and 5 deep (this leaves a little wiggle room for cables and such), or 50 per 1U, or 2100 in a 42U full rack.

Hah! That’s production ready if you ask me.

we should all upgrade to gemini on casios, not sure if the processor is powerful enough to run the opentls encryption. perhaps a beowulf cluster can be made

Doesn't this run on one of the CPUs Sega used in the Saturn or Dreamcast?

Not quite the same CPU but they're all based on the SuperH ISA. The 32X and Saturn both had dual SH-2s, Dreamcast had an SH-4, and Casio uses SH-3 and SH-4. The Dreamcast SH-4 has an FPU but the Casio one doesn't.

Same as in the Dreamcast yes, albeit the Casio seems to be clocked far lower (29mhz in Casio vs 200mhz for DC). Also the memory seems a bit anemic at 60ish-kb vs 16mb main for the DC (+8mb videomem and 2mb audiomem).

It was a fine CPU for the era with parallel instructions but also a fairly deep pipe compared to other contemporaries so it did best with a bit of hand tuning. (We worked on a DC game and Transform&Lighting loops needed hand optimizations iirc)

>29mhz in Casio

It's extremely overclockable, though: http://pm.matrix.jp/ftune2e.html

That makes me think that a solar interntet is possible, perhaps routers and less intensive webpages may start moving if there was a value proposition for their owners. Sure it's not a whole solution just yet, but it's a start.

Lowtech Magazine has a mirror of their site hosted on a laptop and fully powered by solar that's been running for a few years now.

I'm not really proud of this but my 1st step into programming was writing programs to calculate things for me on the TI in high school.

At some point teachers made us delete programs in front of them before major tests.....someone else wrote a program that would simulate deleting programs and showed an empty screen which meant all programs were deleted.

I wasn't a dumb kid but I always felt like why just not program those things and have more free time? I guess I was always a dev.

This is really cool, but these days I prefer to host on virtualized Casios so I can scale up if I need Casio FX perf or down if I need Casio Databank perf.

Needed this today, thank you.

Assuming Casios can run links or some custom browser - does anyone want to grab a snapshot of this page being rendered on their calculator to complete the circle?

Its a great mystery to me why American students have to buy expensive programmable calculators for course work. I vaguely remember reading that it is the result of lobbying by calculator manufacturers.

In my country even undergraduate science/engineering students dont need a programmable calculator. Some undergraduate programs like CS don't need any type of calculator.

They are not expensive: https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-9750GII-Graphing-Calculator-...

More than the quantum of the expense, I am questioning the need. Couple of hundred dollars on an unnecessary expense is still wastage.

But for Calculus (part of CS) you need a graphing calculator.

You don’t, unless the teaching staff decide to include a lot of numerical work in exams. Which I don’t know why they would do. I would presume that a calculus course would teach you algebraic methods that you work out on paper.

In Swedish engineering schools, graphing calculators are banned from exams in almost all subject.

Why? I've done calculus and analysis in college and no one has ever used a calculator, I'm not even sure what you would need one for, can you give me an example (seriously curious)

The only time I remember needing a calculator in my entire education was some circuit theory because those Thevenins and Nortons get real ugly real fast (but even then you only need +,-,*,/)

This is not calculus specific, but how did you look up logarithms? With printed tables??

The same way as pi, e and other constants, log(17) is just that. I never had to convert them to some decimal approximation in calculus classes

Edit: Ok, I remember now there was a statistics exam when we had something like Student's t-distribution tabulated on the exam sheet but I had to scrape my brain to find an example, it does happen though

> The only time I remember needing a calculator in my entire education

I’m not asking about calculus classes. You specifically said “my entire education”

So you never needed to convert log(17) to decimal in your entire education? Or you just converted it by hand like the Neanderthals did?

You don't need a 100+£ programmable calculator for calculating log(17).

He didn't mention 100+£ or any price. He said he never used a calculator in college -- even a 5£ calculator.

Not on a piece of paper, no.

Of course I had to at some point but in those instances I was at a computer anyway so I just used excel/python/matlab what have you, not a calculator like a Neanderthal

Why? Calculus is primarily used and taught analytically in maths & cs courses in my country.

I got mine for 25 cents. They're fun.

Interesting. I still have a Jornada 680, which uses the Hitachi SH3 CPU (compared to this Casio's SH4). It came with Windows CE, but there was a Linux distro for it called Jlime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jlime

This calculator got me through college. I then passed it down to my brother and it lasted him through college also.

Time for your brother to consider setting up a webserver on it! /s

The TI 80 series were more popular in my college days, perhaps these Casio's were more popular in another time or region?

I think Casio calculators are quite popular in the UK - I used an fx570 through secondary school and university. It was the one recommended by my school, and then it was one of the three models (all Casio) allowed by my university[1]. I briefly had a TI83 for A-Level Further Maths, but I didn't use it much.

The fx-9750 would have been usable at secondary school (though it's more powerful than what you really need), but it wasn't on my university's allowed list.

[1] Currently you can use an fx 991, fx 115, or fx 570 for CS, and I pretty sure the list was the same whilst I was there - https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/teaching/exams/calculators

Not anymore

Funny that it seems to not have been affected at all by HN's hug of death.

I subscribed it to an uptime monitor - https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/fxip.as203478.net.html

Twitter thread.[0]

[0] https://twitter.com/Manawyrm/status/1414901574267248643

Shame, because I only have an fx-970G Plus which can't run custom code besides BASIC. Otherwise I'd join you in this calculator-net! Awesome project, though

When I got my TI-89 long time ago, I remember that the TI programming scene was very vibrant back then. Many game ports and all of sorts of interesting software.

I can imagine if the site own who is stuck in Mars with a Casio fx-9750GII will attempt to use it to host a web page to communicate back to earth or something.

I'm kind of amazed that a calculator needs a processor as powerful as a SH4. If you had video out you could run Sega games on that thing.

I have a soft spot in my heart for underpowered computers, but practically, I know this is kind of an unnatural fetish, and not really a healthy love. The little computer costs way more and consumes way more per watt than modern systems, and any minimal use case is better done via virtualization in a container on a more capable computer. Yet, the fetishism of all manner of obsolete, underpowered and wildly obsolete chip process technology remains!

I mean, for its normal load it probably consumes far less overall power to service this content than anything else you would replace it with.

From the tech specs: Batteries: 4x AAA Battery life: 230h

From a Google search+answer: Energizer's AAA battery has a capacity of 1250 milliamp hours, or 1.87 watt-hours

So 4 of those can power the device for 230 hours ... that's about 32mW. For reference, a RaspberryPi 2b idles at > 1W.

Seems the CPU from a Dreamcast is a little overkill for a greyscale graphing calculator isn't it?

In 2030 I look forward to renting a casio for a web server instead and being happy about it.

By then, the screen will have almost 20% more pixels, the number of variables will be upgraded from 28 to 32, memory will be upgraded from 62kilobytes to 94kilobytes, and adjusted for inflation, it will still be the same price!

I keep eyeing these calculators but can’t really find an excuse to buy it. But now . . .

According to timestamps of comments here I came approx 12 minutes late. RIP Casio

Loaded for me just now.

based on the hostname, although the httpd isn't answering, it makes me wonder if they also made the calculator speak BGP and take a full ipv4/ipv6 BGP table. Somehow with the RAM requirements I doubt it.

lol! The IP stack does not have forwarding support, but I guess you could implement some rudimentary loopback announcement support.

I think you might have killed the calculator by posting it here. LOL

For comparison: the 32X and Saturn used SH2 processors.

How long until this is available as an AWS image?

Casio is on fire!!

Maybe it logs to a daisy wheel printer ?

ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT

hit ctrl + square root to reload

Impressed the page opened (albeit after 10 seconds) for a high up HN post!

It seems to work!

It's not any more. Please update the title.

Next post: how I burned my Casio calculator.

no https?

Savage

you need at least an HP Prime for that

https is complicated and resource heavy (relative to plain http 1x).

8 years ago I worked for an LED lights company which had a bright idea to put whole ucLinux + webserver to be ran on a microcontroller on an LED light to put a claim on just how smart they are, and that now they are "an Internet company" like as if the dotcom bubble hasn't happened.

So it was a $1 LED light board + $32 some old, and exotic MCU setup with own external memory, power supply, etc (even by 2013, ucLinux was already "very dead" without any new MCU support for 8-7 years.)

Aside from most extreme size limitations for the HTML UI, I was genuinely surprised just how snappy it was.

in case??

Not anymore.

pretty impressive for a guy who uses tabs!

Would an Apple Watch be a better place to host a website than a Casio?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com