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Ti-84 Evo

education.ti.com

311–320 of 503 posts

Re: Ti-84 Evo

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much nostalgia. The TI-83 Z80 was how I learned assembly as a teenager, so I could write better calculator games than was possible with TI Basic. Many others here had a similar experience, I’m sure. It’s been a couple decades, but I’m sure I’d still remember most of it if you put me down in front of a bunch of Z80 asm code. One thing that I remember vividly was you had no MUL or DIV, so you have to implement them you…

Same story here (basic was too slow for a phoenix/movable-ship-shooter game). Do you think you could remember most of Z80 ASM? I looked at some old ASM I wrote long ago, and it's hard to follow the logic of the program, since most lines are messing around with the registers. But basics like 'ld hl,xyz' and 'jp/jnz' still make sense.

> Do you think you could remember most of Z80 ASM?

I find when you learn things at 15 they tend to stick around. (Stuff I learned last week, not so much!) Even just looking at your example, I remembered that HL is a 16 bit register and you can split it into two 8 bit registers H and L if you want. I think most of it would come back; I wrote quite a lot of it, both for the TI-83 and later for a Z80 that I bought and put on a breadboard and wired up to some RAM and EEPROM, about as bare metal as it gets.

> most lines are messing around with the registers

Isn’t that just the nature of assembly? :)

Re: Ti-84 Evo

#312

I'm surprised to see "Approved for Exams" featured so prominently, as handheld calculators for lots of standardized exams are being phased out. All of the exams listed are either already offered in a computerized format or in a transition phase, with the PSAT, SAT, APs, and ACT all already offering Desmos in their testing apps. I love handheld calculators, but, especially in a time-sensitive environment, it's hard to…

for context tests like SAT, ACT, and some AP exams are using Desmos, yes however: - this means you have to fiddle with a popover window and can't always see the full problem (especially when the reference sheet is also online) - you have less muscle memory and often take longer - harder to multitask (you use paper anyways, and the paper to calculator friction is lower than the paper to trackpad friction - trackpads o…

Ideally the tests would not require external tools at all. There's nothing that needs to be tested in the context of a high school course that can't done with pencil and paper.

Re: Ti-84 Evo

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mom once was getting ready for work and I hear a pop and hear my mom yelling. I go in and her necklace fell off the dresser; a "dust buster" wall wart was plugged in back there and it fell across the prongs, shorting it out.

This is why you always mount outlets with the grounding pin facing up!

Wow, I never knew they could be installed that way; the US standard doesn't say. Now every time I see a new outlet I'm going to check.

Re: Ti-84 Evo

#315

My TI-85 story. While I was in prison, around 1996 or 1997, I found out a friend had a TI-85 calculator. I realized it was programmable, so I borrowed it over the weekend and wrote a program to track his stock portfolio. It was the first time I had programmed anything in 2 or 3 years. Then I learned that the US Bureau of Prisons had a rule against any calculator (or device) that was "programmable". So I programmed th…

They had TI-85's in late '90s? I remember there only being TI-83s.

They did! The TI-89 is how I aced the AP Math exam.

The TI-92 had recently come out, and it had a QWERTY keyboard and could solve symbolic calculus problems like "find the derivative of 2x^3". This was a problem for the AP exam, since you could just type in the problem and get the answer. They fixed this by banning calculators with QWERTY keyboards. That's just about exactly when the TI-89 came out, which also did symbolic calculus but did not have a QWERTY keyboard, and so it was totally allowed on the exam. Boom, 5/5 exam score for Jorji.

Re: Ti-84 Evo

#316
post #19

75” 4k OLED screens would have been unobtainable when I first used a TI. 10yrs ago they would have been 4 to 5 figures. Now they are what? A couple hundred? How in the world is a TI graphing calculator still $160? These 30yr old calculator chips apparently hold their value like gold…

Wow, no comment yet for https://xkcd.com/768/

Re: Ti-84 Evo

#317

My TI-85 story. While I was in prison, around 1996 or 1997, I found out a friend had a TI-85 calculator. I realized it was programmable, so I borrowed it over the weekend and wrote a program to track his stock portfolio. It was the first time I had programmed anything in 2 or 3 years. Then I learned that the US Bureau of Prisons had a rule against any calculator (or device) that was "programmable". So I programmed th…

Perhaps this is a foolish question: how did your friend actually use the tracker? Did he input the prices from the newspapers or TV news?

Re: Ti-84 Evo

#318
post #25

> Not just an upgrade — an EVOlution Oh no.

You’re absolutely right! …LLM-isms are like nails on chalkboard I swear. Instant turn off the moment I read them. Even if they’re maybe not lol, doesn’t matter my visceral reaction is negative.

That's just what standard marketing copy sounds like.

...which perhaps says a lot about the corpora that the models are trained on.

Re: Ti-84 Evo

#319
Nostalgia aside... these things aren't really that great and are overpriced for what they are. TI sustains itself on basically extorting high schools and colleges to use that.. because most of the teachers just used these.

I'm not sure such a device really improved any understanding of the underlying mathematics that I was taught. In fact, in more advanced mathematics these machines can't even keep up.

Re: Ti-84 Evo

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly got a lot of educational value out of mine. I managed to program a fully functional Minesweeper game on mine, using the built-in programming tools - no transferring efficient binaries via cable! But yes. 99% of what we did with them in class - when we were even allowed to use them - could have been handled by a little solar-powered calculator with basic arithmetic functions.

Programming mine in high school is how I ended up coding for the first time and led to my current career. Honestly a pretty good investment (from my parents) I'd say.

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