Calculators now emulated at Internet Archive
blog.archive.org
blog.archive.org
If you became fluent using all features of TI-89 (integration, derivation, diff. eqs., shortcut keys etc.) and you had a solid abstract understanding of the subject (which of course required some studying), TI-89 basically got the rest of the job done in minutes. TI-89 was magic.
Also, to try and combat those kinds of things my school always had us show them the list of programs on our TI-84 Plus calculators before a test started, and we had to delete anything outside of what was allowed. That being said I think the calculator can be modded with custom things that could be hidden. So probably the best way of preventing people from cheating was by paying attention to who was using the calculator too much.
It had a nice side effect of saving my bacon several times on final exams. On my engineering electromagnetics final I forgot to change the batteries in my TI-89 the night before and the calculator didn't work. I ended up having to re-derive a small bit of transmission line theory from scratch in order to solve the problems. I somehow managed to be one of the first people done anyway. I did have fun making arcade game clones and custom boot screens in assembly on it though.
That calculator, even thirty years later is close to my heart. As far as I can remember, it was my first Internet purchase lightly used -- I was still in Hungary and I bought it from the USA -- and then we stacked four SRAM ICs on top of each other with most legs simple melted together vertically except for the select ones. Hand soldering SMT parts, yay -- a buddy did it, I am not crafty enough for that. In essence it became a much more expensive 48GX without the expansion slot. Dave Arnett himself was participating in these conversations, back then, which blew my mind. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.hp48/c/CS0lTpKkBHw/m/vn...
The funniest thing I ever did back then was to hook up the serial port to a 1200 baud modem with lots of big red blinkenlights. I found a simple terminal emulator program and used it to dial out to the county public library system, which offered free email addresses. Once I got it working, I carefully coiled up my custom serial cable and a phone cord of sufficient length in a plastic bag and took them to school with me. Just before lunch near the end of calculus class I quietly got up and strung the cable across the room to a phone jack. Then I went back to my desk, typed in the AT command to start dialing, and grinned as the screech of the modem brought the lecture to an early conclusion. Of course my teacher was annoyed, but even he had join the laughter when I told him that I was just checking my email.
Even funnier if you knew that I spent most of my lunch hours either in my Physics teacher’s classroom playing spades (he taught the Calculus class right after lunch, which was convenient), or in the library where they had some terminals plugged into the card catalog system. You could break out of their telnet session and then telnet to wherever you wanted, so I often spent my lunch hour by checking my email (and then logging into a bulletin board to play the door games), so the modem wasn’t actually necessary.
Incidentally, I changed the title on https://archive.org/details/hp48gp-calculator to “HP48G+”, as you suggested. Changing the identifier is a rather more fraught process akin to deleting the item and reuploading it, so I’ll let it be. And I bet the MAME driver is named “hp48gp”, so it’s fine.
Thanks for upgrading the title.
Now that you mention it, I don’t recall where I sourced the connector for the serial port. There was nothing unusual about it the connector, but I no longer remember that detail; oh well.
maybe the P is for "plus"
A fast way of identifying calculators that have identical internal math, and a crude way of judging their quality.
Here's an online emulator you can play around with: http://mk-61.moy.su/emulator.html
These calculators are interesting:
Extremely slow: inverse sin takes ~3 seconds.
Dead keyboard: they use foam for the key spring so there is almost no action. The plastic keys touch membrane contacts.
Leading digits are required before the decimal point: .5 is not allowed, you have to enter 0.5.
The result is only printed in scientific notation: so 1 / 5 gives 2e-1
MK-52: has non-volatile memory. You transfer between RAM and EEPROM via some extra functions.
Even with all these limitations, they are nice RPN programmable calculators with vacuum fluorescent displays. It's cool that they are made with an independent (from the rest of the world) electronics fabrication system.
Like Soviet radios, you get a copy of the schematics along with the calculator.
To get an idea, here are translations of the Cyrillic keys:
https://www.thimet.de/CalcCollection/Calculators/Elektronika...
- is also available as a free iOS app:
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/ihp48/id1549608953
- the latter seemingly well regarded by the HP calculator enthusiasts at:
The singular best benefit this has over an actual HP, for me, is a backlight. I find the original mostly too hard to read today. On the phone, it’s nice and bright and more than functional and useful.
The downside? The teachers were only trained on a specific model, so I was always on my own. Good side? I was on my own to do whatever I wanted with these things. I turned my TI-86 into an animation flipbook and rogue-light dungeon explorer using TI-basic and the drawing tools on the calc. I loaded my TI-92+ down with games and even tried to write a shmup for it while learning C using an absolutely terrible early dev environment I pulled off of ticalc.org.
The ecosystem of hackers, apps, and gamers for these things is wild and very extensive. After university I looked on with envy as later TI calcs added more features and capabilities.
I still run a TI-89 emulator on my phone as the default calculator. It's so much more powerful than the crap calculator apps that come with the phones.
My parents got me TI-83 for my calculus class in high school, which is what everyone had and I was in sync. I managed to drop my calculator down a sewer grating somehow, and I was too embarrassed to ask my parents to buy me a new one, and I couldn't afford another TI graphing calculator, so I ended up getting a substantially cheaper Casio FX-9750G at a thrift store, which actually turned out to be a reasonably good calculator for the price, and got me through Calculus I without too much trouble.
In calculus II I wanted the symbolic stuff, so I managed to find a used HP 50g, and I immediately fell in love with it (and RPN in particular), and ended up using it for everything. I got spreadsheet software installed on there, I played with 3d graphing, I got a clone of Zelda working, it was super awesome. It was almost more like a PDA than a calculator to me.
Similarly, I run an the iHP48 emulator on my phone as my default calculator now.
The TI-89/92 series of calculators feature a Motorola 68000 CPU, and for reasons only younger me can remember, the design of the device felt more Amiga than Mac. The built in d-pad, different kinds of memory, and the integration of the system, it all screamed "GAMES" to me. The "exclusive" club of owners and passionate community of software authors for it also made me identify it more as an Amiga than a Mac.
Some of the stuff people have made for it is mindblowing:
- Arena 3d - https://ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/251/25178.html - Calcwars - https://ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/291/29120.html - CalcRogue - https://ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/260/26014.html - CS3d - https://ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/336/33686.html - Doom89 - https://ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/405/40593.html - Duke 68k - https://ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/222/22258.html - International Karate 68k - https://ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/327/32779.html - Metroid 68k - https://ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/421/42175.html - Phoenix - https://ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/82/8207.html - Super Mario 68k - https://ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/400/40006.html - Sumo Wrestling - https://ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/369/36964.html - Ultima - https://ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/470/47009.html
It even works with original printer. That for some reason still had replacement printer heads available in ~2018 and I managed to fix it.
Compared to these new Internet Archive emulations such as https://archive.org/details/ti89-calculator, Graph 89 has these advantages:
• less likely to drop quick inputs in succession
• higher-resolution images of the calculator faces (example: https://github.com/milaq/graph89/blob/94c8c0d20044f478f66966...)
• highlights the button on the calculator’s face when you click it
• allows loading programs into memory from separate files of the type you can download from https://ticalc.org/
• works offline, because it uses your offline copy of the calculator’s ROM
I got really tired of typing out my physics equations by hand, and I was also bad at memorizing them for physics class, so I decided to cheat and write a program for the calculator that basically "plugged in" a lot of the equations for me.
It ended up being debateably useful, but honestly the act of writing the programs ended up actually being a reasonably good way for me to learn the equations anyway, so I kept it up throughout high school as a form of studying.
Calculators are a relic of when we used to require separate single function devices to accomplish anything, like VCRs, Cameras, GPS receivers, music samplers, or transistor radios.
There is nothing a physical calculator can do that an IPython session can’t. And a physical calculator can’t copy paste the result where you want it (except modern phone camera OCR has I guess got to the point where you could probably grab the result off a calculator screen).
Outside of cases where you need dedicated pieces of hardware to accomplish a task, like motors or heating elements or something, there’s very little reason for preferring a dedicated device these days over a software or app equivalent. And even then, a version of the hardware that hooks up to a general purpose device to use its input and screen is likely the most useful form factor.
Modern ‘single function devices’ are most likely actually just low power multifunction computers running most of the functionality in software anyway.
And having a separate dedicated device helps having a workflow that doesn't invite distraction or context switching on a universal device, so having a dedicated device often is a reasonable intentional choice even if the same functionality is already available on another non-dedicated device.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-16C
Swiss Micro seems to be producing clones:
They make a clone of the programmer HP-16c that is pretty nice. Everything is open source too, so there’s modding potential if you are into that kind of thing.
Almost everyone at my HS got it through a sneakernet of seniors.
http://www.srtco.us/PostCrossRef/SubPages/1460%5B1950-%5D.ht...
If the copyright holders complain, IA will make the complained–about items dark. That means nobody can see them, though without actually losing any of the files or metadata. If anyone remembers the dark calculators a century from now, someone at IA will be able to reverse the decision and make them available to the public again.
This isn't necessarily true. In fact, it could be the opposite. It may be very good PR for them and could cost as little as some board meetings and some lawyers' time.
The 89 is quite a feat of engineering and can do stuff like simplifying algebraic equations on the fly.
I always wanted something like a cross between the 89 and a spreadsheet where I could see my math represented as an algebraic formula to double check that everything was wired up.
I’ve always wondered how all of it worked inside the 89
Funnily I updated the ROMs of 2 HP 49g this weekend through that exact screen.
I've been using the degrees/minutes/seconds for astronomy calculations! It's funny because I bought the calculator after watching Dave do a review of it on the EEVBlog [1] youtube channel. He actually wishes they'd get rid of the DMS key in favour of some other keys he prefers for doing electronics calculations (polar <-> rectangular conversions). I bought it anyway thinking I'd have no use for DMS but here I am using it!
Before that I was an IT guy, programmer, electronics technician, etc.
"TI-83 Plus Calculator Emulation" https://archive.org/details/ti83p-calculator
TI-83 series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-83_series :
> Symbolic manipulation (differentiation, algebra) is not built into the TI-83 Plus. It can be programmed using a language called TI-BASIC, which is similar to the BASIC computer language. Programming may also be done in TI Assembly, made up of Z80 assembly and a collection of TI provided system calls. Assembly programs run much faster, but are more difficult to write. Thus, the writing of Assembly programs is often done on a computer.
I had a TI-83 Plus in middle school, and then bought a TI-83 Plus Silver edition for high school. The TI-83 Plus was the best calculator allowed for use by the program back then. FWIU these days it's the TI-84 Plus, which has USB but no CAS Computer Algebra System.
The JupyterLite build of JupyterLab - and https://NumPy.org/ - include the SymPy CAS Computer Algebra System and a number of other libraries; and there's an `assert` statement in Python; but you'd need to build your own JupyterLab WASM bundle to host as static HTML if you want to include something controversial like pytest-hypothesis. https://jupyterlite.rtfd.io/
Better than a TI-83 Plus emulator? Install MambaForge in a container to get the `conda` and `mamba` package managers (and LLVM-optimized CPython on Win, Mac, Lin) and then `mamba install -y jupyterlab tabulate pandas matplotlib sympy`; or login to e.g. Google Colab, Cocalc, or https://Kaggle.com/learn ( https://GitHub.com/Kaggle/docker-python ) .
To install packages every time a notebook runs:
!python -m pip install # or
%pip install <pkgs>
!conda install -y
!mamba install -y
But NumPy.org, JupyterLite, and Colab, and Kaggle Learn all already have a version of SymPy installed (per their reproducible software version dependency files; requirements.txt, environment.yml (Jupyter REES; repo2docker))Like MAME, which is the emulator for the TI-83 Plus and other calculators hosted by this new Internet Archive project, Emscripten-forge builds WASM (WebAssembly) that runs in an application-sandboxed browser tab as the same user as other browser tab subprocesses.
ACT Math Section app; /? TI-83 ACT app: https://www.google.com/search?q=ti83+act+app
Commodity markets with volatility on your monochrome LCD calculato with no WiFi. SimCity BuildIt has an online commodity marketplace and sims as part of the simulation game. "Category:TI-83&4 series Zilog Z80 games" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:TI-83%264_series_Zilo...
Computer Algebra System > Use in education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_algebra_system#Use_in... :
> CAS-equipped calculators are not permitted on the ACT, the PLAN, and in some classrooms[15] though it may be permitted on all of College Board's calculator-permitted tests, including the SAT, some SAT Subject Tests and the AP Calculus, Chemistry, Physics, and Statistics exams.
Other cool math calculation apps for phones and tablets without bash, git, python and conda/mamba: Geogebra, Desmos, QuantumQ, (FDroid Termux + conda, Waydroid,)