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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

I use a Casio fx-991ES PLUS every day. Its only obvious advantage over the much more common fx-85GT (?) is that it has hex, binary, and octal conversion modes.

I did buy a TI calculator after hearing Americans rave about them on the Internet, mine is a TI-83 Plus. It was more expensive than the Casio, even secondhand, but it sucks so I don't use it. The Casio is way easier to use, and the Casio gives the answer as a fraction when it is rational, instead of always formatting it with decimal places.

The TI doesn't have mathematical formatting of the input, so you have to remember how your parentheses line up manually. It does have the advantage of having a larger display and showing a short history on it. I just got it out to try and remember what I hated about it, and I can't remember. Maybe it's just the lack of rational output.

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I'm curious when you bought that TI calculator and whether you were aware of the whole scene around the TI-83+/TI-84 calculators. When I was in high school, these calculators were the required calculators for certain classes and exams. But a lot of my classmates liked these calculators because of a niche online community that had figured out how to write assembly programs that targeted the Z80 processor in these calculators. And that meant that we could load games like Tetris or Phoenix (a Space Invaders clone).

Yeah, and I learned my first real programming using TI-BASIC on my TI-85 calculator (in the middle of class even) way back in 7th grade. Made choose your own adventure games, action games using text characters on the screen, like there was an Arkanoid-style game I think I copied from somewhere, and then I came up with my own game about moving an ant around a field, hiding in tall grass from spiders, and picking up peas for points.

Later on I made a text driven fighting game that had like 50 fighters from a bunch of different games in it, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct, etc. Then near the end I had a multi-class text-driven RPG where you went out fighting in different regions as long as you could manage then returned to an inn to heal, buy equipment, etc.

Most of that was made using two thumbs on a calculator while bored during math classes or any other class I could pretend I needed my calculator for.

Really boosted my understanding of the basics of programming pretty early in life, and gave me an even bigger boost when I took the one programming class in high school, which was focused on QuickBasic.

As for the main topic, I have my old TI-85 still, and I got a TI-NSPIRE as well since, but I am not very good about using it nowadays, unfortunately. I keep meaning to, but I haven't really needed to.

You can program the graphing Casio ones as well

The TIs have much more sane programming language than Casios.

I’ve never tried the built in one, I compile C or C++ to native code. You also have Python available but it’s not that good (e.g. the font size is too big)

If you would like, could you explain why you need to use a calculator every day?

I am probably in a massive techno bubble, right?

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