TI-83 Plus One More | Hacker News Reader

TI-83 Plus One More

leadedsolder.com

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> Over the course of several decades, they must have been making a large integer multiple of the build cost in pure margin while not updating the product.

Yup, this is an open secret about calculators: they are basically regulatory capture nowadays, since you can buy much more powerful devices for cheaper. Software used to be an advantage, but the algorithms they use are now common knowledge.

You can also use an alternative like NumWorks, that has source-available software and lets you run your own code; they have played the regulation game and have a reset button that allows them to be used at some exams in France, Italy, Netherlands, some US states, etc.

The NumWorks calculator looks very interesting. Too bad it does not have a RPN mode.

Otherwise the SwissMicros calculators can be recommended. They are all RPN and are modeled after iconic HP calcs. They are just very pricey, especially for non-graphing calcs.

My DM42 broke in under 2 weeks and Swissmicros support was completely unreachable. I would strongly recommend getting a used older HP calculator instead.

I had the exact opposite experience. After already owning a DM42, DM41X, and a DM16L, and I bought a DM12L for a client. The screen had several LCD segments that faintly showed as always on. I wrote an email and was contacted by Michael (the founder) almost immediately. He said they'd happily take it back and send me a new one, but it would take a few weeks for shipping from Europe. Instead he suggested that I first try putting it in the oven at 70C (160F for us 'Mericans) for a few hours. So I disassembled it and put just the PCB/display unit in the oven. And sure enough: problem solved!

tl;dr: I thought their service was great.

Although I do love my real HP's, too. I own maybe a dozen. I think the 32sII is my favorite, but I dearly miss my 41CV from back in the day. Maybe I should find a used one of those.

On the programming side: I definitely agree with those saying calculators were/are an entry to programming. My first programs were on an HP-29c. I thought I had invented binary search!

Can I ask when you had this exchange, which email you contacted (I've tried emailing both the support address and the individual addresses) and which email provider you use?

This was in early March 2020 (so, just pre-Covid). I was using orders@swissmicros.com, because I was responding to the invoice they sent me. And I self-host my email server. Hope that helps.

The Omega alternate firmware does have RPN

https://getomega.dev/

I had the privilege of buying two expensive calculators. First, a TI-85 (1993) and then a new math teacher hired was more familiar with the HP-48G (1995) and had us get one. While fun to use to goof off in class, I felt they were like learning to use a slide rule: obsolete before you bought them. Did the small screen and the over-precise numeric answers give us a better idea of what we were doing than pencil and graph paper? Did it make any students appreciate math subjects more?

Having built an RPN evaluator at summer camp, I appreciated that my friends were learning it, too, on the HP-48.

In college, I literally never used it. A simple scientific calculator was almost always more useful.

I'd argue that a sliderule is at least something you can manipulate with your hands and immediately see the output relationship.

Tangent, I use a tape measure at work and you can fold it back on itself to make a basic slide rule for quick addition and subtraction without bothering with fractions :)

It is a shame that calculators are stuck in the past for silly regulatory reasons, but there is a silver lining. These relics are excellent machines for learning low level programming without the complexity of modern hardware. You can write C code with essentially no operating system underneath you, read the keyboard I/O registers directly, flip pixels on the screen by writing to the framebuffer pointer, write your own interrupt handlers, etc. There are no other widely available computers this simple anymore, and because of their ubiquity there is still an active hobbyist community making new software.

If I was going to make a course on programming I would get every student a calculator and have them write some C on it.

> there is a silver lining. These relics are excellent machines for learning low level programming without the complexity of modern hardware.

My thought exactly. Give kids a calculator app for their phone, and I'm positive far fewer would end up writing code for it - and fewer would end up as developers.

There's something so cool about writing a little game and showing it to your friends when you're in 9th grade. "Dude, you programmed a game on your calculator?! You're a genius" is so fun to hear at 14 years old.

Do you have any knowledge whether there's still much of this going on?

I remember futzing around with TI Basic and downloading/sharing more complex games from others... but we didn't have smartphones then. I just wonder to what extent students still care about that stuff today.

I suppose there's still some appeal from the "look like you're doing work" factor if nothing else.

The Raspberry Pi Pico has opened the door to young experimenters thanks to the MMBasic programming language from Geoff Graham. There are several excellent videos that explain the setup and operation. The Pico is actually available for $4. The software and manual (PDF) are free to download. It is super easy to get started - 5 minutes and you're writing software that can solve problems and control I/O.

PicoMite: Running BASIC on a Raspberry Pi Pico

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxmjy1nz6MM

PicoMiteVGA Raspberry Pi Pico Running BASIC on VGA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIK1ujslHHI

....

Yes yes, but the pico is a lot harder to program during class while looking like you are doing school work.

It's funny reading this thread where everyone is leaning towards "those dang kids and their smartphones are missing out" while ignoring things like Roblox, where entire economies are being built of the creativity of kids

I don’t want economies, I want kids to have genuine, self-directed creative outlets. At best today Roblox is baby’s first hustle culture.

You're kidding right?

Having "Robux" instead of the imaginary karma random forums, or the points different game portals had, or literally just the grind for downloads some people had somehow dashes the incredible stuff kids are inventing for play by other kids?

Kids will not somehow be ruined by having an outward reward for the creativity. It doesn't work like that.

Just to clarify, I don't mean that kids are not programming or making games in whatever form, just that they might not care to do so on a frozen-in-time TI calculator as much as used to be the case, so the "silver lining" of an unnecessarily expensive TI calculator being a child's first programming environment might not really exist anymore. As you say, kids have many other options today.

Looking on Amazon... TI calculators are running Python nowadays. Much easier to understand but C would be a much better introduction to computing for them :(

TI has never supported C on its calculators. That's part of the fun :)

It supported Assembly officially, which is better to learn how computers actually work, although they seem to have dropped support for it recently.

Oh I thought they'd changed since I was at school :) In my day they only had ASM. Only my C64 was way more capable / interesting.

The NSpire was running Lua at one point…

My son just finished 9th grade and wanted to know about machine language and assembly language. I got him a Digirule 2U from bradsprojects and it clicked immediately. He wrote his first programs by hand and bit-banged them from the front panel, just like I once did on a Cosmac ELF. He found bugs and patched his programs. By playing with it, he learned about addressing modes, self-modifying code, the usefulness of a stack for implementing function calls... all of this he taught himself, in the space of a few afternoons. And just as he understood that programming like this was becoming very tedious, I showed him a symbolic assembler.

Writing C for the TI-83+ is generally not a very pleasant experience. Now, for the m68k TI-89, that’s a different story.

Could be worse, the contemporaneous up-market option was still HP at the TI-83 time, no? In that case if I recall correctly your only options were reverse polish lisp and assembly...

I learned how to program basic on my 83 over a weekend between my track and field events. Made the calculator much more usable.

Yeah, absolutely. I learned to code in middle school in TI Basic during math class (much to my math teacher's dismay), writing little platformer games as a snarl of GOTOs and pixel on-off (because the more robust drawing functions weren't fast enough to do real-time gameplay/animation). Impossible code to read, but I had a lot of fun.

Damn, that would be incredible. Any chance you’d consider making a YouTube series?

I plan to check out https://www.aoz.studio/ its by the guy who wrote the legendary AMOS games programming software for the Amiga and looks a fun way to teach programming

Mine was a hand me down from my older sister. Our public school did have some TI-82s that they lent out for classes, but that wasn’t always the case and the cost of a calculator was certainly a burden on some families.

Most of the schools I work with now have their students use Desmos, a free online graphing calculator. So thankfully, we've been moving away from TI.

In some states of Germany they also lobbied for advanced high school courses to require a Voyage 200 (after you already shelled out for a TI-84+). This thing was pricy and the school ended up having a few units to lend out because not everyone could afford them.

There's one thing that calculators can do that powerful modern gadgets cannot: run on AAA batteries.

It doesn't even have to be something as old as TI-83, too. For example, Casio Prizm FX-50 has a color screen, and can be mounted over USB as a storage device. And in terms of hardware power, it's fast enough to run a NES emulator: https://github.com/tswilliamson/nesizm.

(For the curious, here's a dev wiki for this platform: https://prizm.cemetech.net/index.php/Prizm_Programming_Porta...)

Meanwhile, on Spain we can use any cheap Casio calculator (really any calculator).

Even without regulation, there's another aspect to know of: how to use the features of your calculators. If your teacher doesn't know the model, you'll be left learning both new class concepts, and new calculator features on your own. It's entirely doable (I always had my casio graph calculator manual with me through the end of high school), but needs more effort.

Casio rules also on the other side of the Iberian penisula.

> Asking a bunch of rich suburbanite kids to spend $150-180 Canadian on a TI-84 Plus is one thing, but I’m not sure I could really sleep at night forcing a disadvantaged family to pay that much for a machine – multiple days of work at even a $15 minimum wage – that surely didn’t cost more than $20 to construct.

There's a point where you have to realize a company has a duty not only to its shareholders, but to the society it exists in. When you achieve a monopoly, you become responsible for a lot of collaterals you normally wouldn't consider.

Microsoft stumbled when they forgot that, while they had a student discount for their products, the real reason so many young people came into the job market with Windows experience was piracy.

When they went after businesses for piracy, people were mostly okay with that. When deep pockets are fined that does not lead to moral outrage. When they made it very difficult to pirate, they injured the hobbyist market.

There is definitely a place in the world for low margin products aimed at fairness and advertising. And with hardware, ignoring piracy doesn’t really work, so there are really only two options. Subsidized sales, or a very robust resale market. The latter requires explicit support for First Sale Doctrine, products designed for repair, and narrow enough gaps between new and old hardware that the newest stuff is attractive but not mandatory. Do some of those but not the other and you get accused of paying lip service but having no solution. And for the most part they are right.

There are YouTube videos of people buying eight broken Nintendo handhelds and trying to salvage 5 working devices out of them. These are noteworthy because it’s harder than it should be, and sometimes these people lose money on the project, only breaking even from the YouTube royalties. If social justice were a goal, you’d need to at least double that success rate, maybe more.

If someone is smart enough to turn eight broken Nintendo handhelds into five working ones their skills would probably be better put to something more useful.

Aside from a lack of empathy this just isn’t true. TV repair shops aren’t the great career they used to be; you can’t make a living on basic soldering skills, a Radio Shack catalog, patience and elbow grease, and a good set of screwdrivers anymore.

Most of the programmers I know would not be able to do that, what I mean is that they should become programmers.

There’s no special skill overlap between programming and repairing consumer electronics with parts from other consumer electronics.

I think the Right to Repair people want a world where that’s at least marginally true.

You can be good at more than one thing in your life. If all you do is program you’ve hamstrung yourself badly. Some people see it and course correct, others become old men, full of regret.

I’ve known of two bike clubs that would refurbish old bikes for kids. Once you learn enough maintenance to trust your own repairs at speeds and distances most people avoid, doing repairs for others isn’t much of a stretch. Fixing calculators or tablets or game boys wouldn’t be a full time job. A lot of social projects are volunteer or nonprofit.

To argue that a company's only duty is to its shareholders does open one up to the argument that nobody but the shareholders (and maybe the employees) owes any duty to companies (e.g. respecting their property). Why should anyone pay for their products or services in such a worldview? You have to be a special kind of stupid to feel more sympathy for big cooperations than disadvantaged pupils and their parents.

I'm honestly surprised that groups like Pine64 haven't tried making an open source competitor.

edit: just saw a few comments down that NumWorks is basically that?

edit2: based on Phi and Omega[1][2] it looks like they no longer truly are (probably to comply with the regulation nonsense), but they still can be jailbroken.

[0] https://www.numworks.com/

[1] https://phi.getomega.dev/

[2] https://getomega.dev/

The barrier to replacing TI isn’t hardware. Casio has cheaper calculators and test makers generally have a pretty big selection of acceptable calulators[1]. The barrier is often teachers. They don’t want to change from what they know already.

1: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/what-to-bring-do/calcu...

Used ones go for about $25 on Ebay https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...

Same on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ti-83+plus&crid=1OPODU9X5ZHVY&spr...

In-person used stores are likely cheaper still (Salvation Army, etc).

The thing about producing a long-lived device that a person only uses for a decade, without ever updating the product... is that the used market very quickly saturates.

A more descriptive title would be, "TI-83 LCD ribbon repair".

I have my old TI-86 which seems to have the same problem so I'll have to try the same technique.

The TI calculators were amazing environments for learning assembly. There are a bunch of good tutorials and the computer is relatively simple and you get direct access to the display.

I replaced the failed ribbon cable with small wires on my ti-83+ probably 7 years ago now. It was pretty straight forward. I've used the calculator maybe once since then, but I keep it around for nostalgia.

I don't know if the author will see this or not. The RF shielding probably didn't get wet. It just looks like that. I have a TI-83 Plus Silver Edition which sports a semi-transparent case. I'm the original owner. I never got a drop of liquid on it. And the RF shield in mine looks exactly like yours. It has since the day I bought it.

As an adult I've discovered the joys of RPN for calculators. I use free42/plus42 on my phone which is an opensource simulator of the HP42. My kids havent started using calculators yet, but I'm debating whether it's a good idea to teach them RPN. I think it's a better way of using calculators, but don't want them to get confused in class. Add to that there isn't a simple RPN calculator that I know of.

As a newly-graduated mechanical engineer with 8 years of being on the TI-8(1|2|3) bandwagon, I bought a HP-35s six months after graduating because my co-worker would consistently get answers faster than me on his calculator. It's just faster to key in everyday things in RPN vs infix notation.

Agree - I like being able to just start putting the values in before I've figured out what needs calculated first. You can then shuffle them around and bring in value from further up the stack as they're needed, all while seeing intermediate results. That beats having to backtrack to add brackets, or saving to memory registers because your calculated value is the denominator or something.

One day I'll buy a macro/numpad with an LCD screen and run some kind of simple RPN for my desk.

My high school basically expected you to get a TI 83. My dad decided that it was a ripoff and we got Casios instead. Casios? Oh, nothing survived in my backpack. Nothing, so Casios.

Eventually my school got around to issuing me and my acadec teammates TI-89s.

Looking back, I still think the most useful aspect was being able to see what calculation you typed in, so you could check for typos.

similar situation, but in my case the school wanted everyone to have a TI-82. when we went to walmart, they were out of 82s, so my folks splurged and bought me an 85 without knowing the incompatibilities.

not being able to link with peers and teachers sucked, but that calculator gave me my first taste of hardware -- building a pc link cable by cramming two diodes and half a link cable into my pc parallel port, and first taste of z80 assembly

I remember when these started taking over. Last semester's calculus class became next semester's "calculator" class. Okay for a few budding programmers; an educational decline for everyone else. And I never understood the programming appeal. Circa 1996, a thrift-store commodore was still a cheaper & better programming experience.

I was also fairly pissed about having to pay $100+ on a calculator which was wholly unnecessary for learning "area under the curve" and "slope at a point". College is such a shakedown.

I've owned a TI-84+ calculator since around middle school (they are priced ridiculously everywhere on the planet, and this only exacerbates the problem because of purchasing power differences). However, it can provide a unique programming environment that rivals modern setups with a lot of learning potential (perhaps I would recommend NumWorks these days, but it's still $100.)

One of the earliest programs I wrote in middle school was a program to solve quadratic equations given the coefficients, then a program to compute the golden ratio by iterating the function f(x) = 1+1/x, and a Langston's ant program (all written in TI-BASIC on the device itself, with zero setup necessary.)

Later on in high school (late 2010s) as I learned C programming and data structures on my own, I read "Learn TI-83 Plus Assembly In 28 Days"[0] and got into assembly programming, eventually culminating in a Forth-based operating system[1] that runs from boot. You do need to have a computer for this setup, but the calculator comes with a cable in the box. It also was not uncommon to see other high school students download games or do light forms of hacking (mostly centered around storing data to be retrieved during exams.)

Contrast this to if you wanted to do assembly programming on a modern computer and understand the boot processes of your machine. It's significantly more complicated that even at the university level it is not taught in detail. The boot process[2] or memory mapping[3] for the 84+ can be understood relatively easily, and the assembly instructions are much simpler.

While I similarly lament the price point, the fact that you have essentially given/required the purchase of a standardized, self-contained, non-trivial computer to students could potentially be used to teach programming and computer science from an early age.

[0] https://tutorials.eeems.ca/ASMin28Days/lesson/toc.html

[1] https://github.com/siraben/zkeme80

[2] https://wikiti.brandonw.net/index.php?title=83Plus:State_of_...

[3] https://wikiti.brandonw.net/index.php?title=83Plus:Memory_Ma...

I followed the same tutorial as a kid, thanks for the happy memories

I programmed a ton of stuff on my calculator for various math classes. The one I was most proud of was a Newton's Method program that would show all the intermediate steps that simulated doing it by hand. That hour of programming saved me a solid 10 minutes in my calculus exam.

Tangentially related, I just finished porting wxWabbitemu (TI calculator emulator) to WASM last week [1]. I recently switched to iOS from Android and sorely missed the TI emulator app. I use my TI-85 from high school as my desk calculator and the primary calculator on my phone.

The UI is meant for cell phones, I don't have a max-width set so it looks funky on a full desktop browser.

[1] https://marwatk.github.io/wasmwabbitemu/

The vias are there in order to connect different "islands" of the ground plane together I think. (Not literal disconnected islands, but you generally want ground planes on different layers to be connected as much as possible).

My first platform for programming! Simple Menus, Goto statements, images. I loved making games on this thing.

And yes, it was highway robbery at $90+

Same here!

I remember hacking a loop into TI-Basic by having programs call into each other, since there was no looping control flow built in.

Never did write anything more advanced than TI-basic, I'd heard horror stories of people bricking calculators, and mine was an emotionally sensitive hand-me-down.

TI-BASIC definitely had loops, though maybe not on the version you had? I had the TI-85/86 (which were mostly identical, the 85 was stolen by a student in the tutoring lab I volunteered in in high school). Looking up TI-83 manuals, they had for and while loops.

I was on a TI-83, not a plus, and couldn't find them at all.

Always possible I was just an idiot. I remember having looked it up, but I was also a dumb high schooler at the time.

Lol, unfortunately I think you just missed it. Software-wise, the TI-83 was nearly identical to the plus. I actually had a later revision of TI-83 that had an identical housing to the plus, but with differently tinted buttons.

I had a TI-83+, not a TI-83, so I can't be sure but I suspect you're misremembering which feature was missing: The + did have while loops but didn't have functions, but calling another program worked like a function call with no parameters and no return value (and you could fake both by using the global variables).

`Ans` stored the value of the last expression, so you could use that as a “return value” of sorts.

What at least the 85/86 series didn't permit (86 was almost identical to the 85) was direct recursion, which woulds fail immediately. I don't think I ever tried indirect recursion, which also would have failed. If I understand correctly, the problem was that there was no call stack (in the way every mainstream language does things anymore). So the return address location for a program was singular, if you made multiple (recursive, direct or indirect) calls into a program where it would return to was whatever the last call set the return address to. Like old school COBOL and FORTRAN where procedures were non-reentrant. Of course, I was in high school too and didn't know about the inner workings of computers like that. So I figured out how to use the list data structure on the calculator as a stack to create my own "recursive" programs either trampolining (A calls B repeatedly in a loop until the list-as-stack is emptied, indicating termination) or with loops (skip the call to B and keep it all in one program).

Limitations lead to creativity.

I wrote a fair amount of assembly for my TI-83 and some assembly and C for my TI-89. I don’t remember it being possible to accidentally brick the calculators because if you messed up enough and froze everything, you just took the batteries out, opened up the case and popped out the little hearing-aid battery which reset everything.

I'm sure that would work - over the years since I learned much more about computers, and realized I needn't have worried so much.

My misconception came from an article I read at some point which described assembly/C (I think) programming as more risky, and I just took it at face value.

It was definitely annoying and if you didn’t have a screwdriver to get inside it was “bricked.”

The one thing I was never brave enough to do was overclock. Supposedly it was just unsoldering a capacitor which would do something like 3x the clock speed.

Me too!

I used it to enter my school's science fair where I wrote a program that was a couple thousand lines to calculate, chart, and explore the relationship between musical notes and frequencies. I didn't have a thesis or anything, just did a bunch of programming, and the judges did not care for it haha. At the time, I didn't even realize it was "programming" a computer, it was just fun!

Once I started to learn to program for real, I thought it was weird that I had to type all the characters myself rather than selecting from a list of pre-defined functions!

I had one of these, and I remember getting all sorts of sticky soda in it. The buttons almost had a crunch to them. Still worked perfectly though! I wonder where it might be after all these years. That thing was a tank!

Chalk up another win for the HP-48, the clearly superior calculator which comes out of the box with conversion among decimal, hexadecimal, octal, and binary number representations.

I always wondered what are the margins for this product, it's the same product for decades, and the price tag remains high.

The cool thing is that it can be passed on younger generations.

https://xkcd.com/768/

I did the same fix for my mother-in-law’s calculator. She teaches high school kids and this is her mainstay. Of course one day it got the dreaded disappearing rows (where two or more rows go dead), and this was the fix someone recommended on the forums.

Now my own 83 is in the same state. Although I have a Ti-89 kicking around, I still miss the ergonomics of the 83.

All in all, wanted to say thanks for the writeup.

That’s an uncanny valley between an HP-32S RPN calculator or a simple algebraic Casio and Octave/Matlab. I don’t think TIs should be needed if exams are correctly prepared by professors. Good professors prepare conceptual and theoretical exams where you can solve most things algebraically or even leave the end result to be evaluated at a final step.

I learned to use the TI-89 in an android emulator, last year, and I find it more useful than the ad-filled native Android apps available as an alternative.

The thing solves symbolic matrix equations like it's nothing. Awesome investment, and zero money spent.

I have done many a repair with kynar wire like this. I am not proud of most of them but they worked afterwards.

Thanks for the post, I have a ti82 with LCD screen issue, I will try this technique!

So many possibilities of a small key based computer.

CollapseOS has a “just to show it’s possible” port to the TI-84+ - https://incoherency.co.uk/collapseos/hw/z80/ti84/index.html

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