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Comment by namdnay | Hacker News Reader

FWIW my kids in France had to have “numworks” calculators. A lot more modern than the Tis of old (and cheaper!)

Those were also full open source until some time ago, then they switched to source-available for the userland with a closed source kernel to prevent modifications allowing cheating on exams. It’s sad they had to take away freedom from the majority of users just to prevent a minority cheating.

And they run python!

https://www.numworks.com/

There's even a smartphone (iOS & Android) app to give it a try, but the magic of a calculator comes with tactile buttons.

I find it really funny that the newer TI stuff has Python now too. But they just stuck an extra ARM microcontroller on board (which is more powerful than the main ez80 CPU). If it ain't broke, support it for 32 years!

Wow. The single click to get to the full emulator from that homepage is an awesome, refreshing thing to see. Seems like a great calculator (and company) to standardize on. I don't even hate TI, but this thing is clearly far more advanced than the TIs I grew up on.

If the 84+ was $40 by now I would feel differently, but I think TI could have at least built something like the Numworks (with things like real fraction notation easier menus, and a lighted color screen) if they wanted to continue charging the same price now as they did 25 years ago for what was then a pretty respectable piece of tech for its time. Instead they did that innovation but only on calculators too overpowered to be allowed on tests, and left that market with a stagnant TI-8x series.

It's a shame it doesn't use Giac. RPN CAS forever! ;)

You can run KhiCAS that’s a port of Xcas as a third party add-on, there are some weird limitations but it mostly works.

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