How are these still so slow?
Ti-84 Evo
331–340 of 503 posts
Re: Ti-84 Evo
#332Do these graphing calculators still use Derive (tm)? pity, there is no pc version anymore
Re: Ti-84 Evo
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
The order was: TI-81 (1990) TI-85 (1992) TI-82 (1993) TI-80 (1995) TI-92 (1995) TI-83 (1996) TI-86 (1996) TI-73 (1998) TI-83 Plus (1999) TI-89 (1998) TI-92 Plus (1998) TI-83 Plus Silver Edition (2001) TI-84 Plus (2004) TI-84 Plus Silver Edition (2004)
Anyone here have an idea why the models jumped around like that? Like why'd the 82 come out after the 85, or the 83 after the 92?
They were different lines. The numbers aren't mean to be chronological; similar to how AMD released some 5000 series AM4 Ryzen chips long after they'd moved on to AM5 and 7000/9000 series.
TI83 (1996) was a successor to the TI82 (1993) which was a refresh/update of the TI81 (1990).
TI85 (1992) was the second model they made, originally intended as a higher end version of the TI81.
Similar reasoning for the rest of their line up. Different models had different features, and then those models would get incremental updates/refreshes over the years.
I wasn't part of the team or anything, so if anyone has any insight to why exactly they called it that in the first place, I'd be interested to know, but generally speaking the answer is: When they released the first one in 1990, they didn't name it under the presumption that this family of devices would be a staple educational/academic electronics device for the next 3 decades with dozen(s?) of different iterations/generations over the years.
Re: Ti-84 Evo
#334We had to buy those calculators for highschool and it was a waste of money, felt like somebody must be paying somebody off to have thousands of students buy a device that they will certainly never have to use (and is of little educational value).
I had a TI-83 in high school and upgraded to a TI-89 for college circa 2002. Used the heck out of those calculators because I did all the math and physics prerequisites for an engineering degree before switching to CS. It also helped me get a B in Linear Algebra thanks to holding a cheat sheet document for the final exam. I had no trouble with the likes of Calculus 3 and differential equations but for some reason the later material in linear algebra didn't click with me.
Re: Ti-84 Evo
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
They had TI-85's in late '90s? I remember there only being TI-83s.
The -85 was released in 1992, iirc it's TI's second graphing calculator. The -83 is a later model.
I was told that one of the designers graduated high-school in '81 and college in '85, so the HS calculator was an 81 and the college calculator was an 85.
Re: Ti-84 Evo
#336I was introduced to the 83 Plus and it was simply the most mindblowing device at the time. We were given a sheet to share with our parents on why it was an important device to own/borrow. Me and several friends would trade apps through the TI-Link cable, and we would play games, write software for it and there was even a popularity rank in school about whose program was installed on more calculators.
For a lot of people it introduced them to TI-Basic which was quite capable, and for others you could get into Assembly which allowed for more powerful applications. There were 2 parts of the memory, BASIC programs were in regular memory that could be easily erased, and another part which was Flash Apps.
I later upgraded to the 89 which had a better CPU, screen resolution and processing power and it was phenomenal in helping me understand every single math class, including EE/EECS. It made me sad to see them banned in exams, because having a 83+/89/any calculator was in no way helpful in any of the exams I took, but it was more of a "control the students" thing in college. The Math department determined that because they couldn't prove that people were not using the internet/portable PC's in their calculators, that they could not guarantee the fairness of it all.
Weird argument to make knowing that a 20 year old student was engineering a full internet capable PC into a calculator at the time would have been the envy of the world (and every engineering program).
This all depends on the quality of education and not simply handing out problems that require rote memorization of the methods to solve an equation and instead derive or figure out the equation yourself after understanding the problem after which you're free to use the calculator to "plug and chug".
Re: Ti-84 Evo
#337Wasting time making games on my TI84 in the back of middle school geometry taught me how to program.
Re: Ti-84 Evo
#338About 25 years ago my parents got me a Ti84 as a surprise for Christmas and they hid it in the attic so I couldn't find it in the meantime. A few months went by and a couple days before Christmas, when it was time to wrap the presents they couldn't find it anymore. My dad went out and got a Casio something as a late minute replacement, and that was the calculator I used in high school and I never knew about this stor…
My dad got a free palm pilot m125 or something and I used a ti/HP calculator emulator on it since my parents thought buying a $99+ calculator was too expensive. fun writing apps in basic for that thing and the games for it were the best mobile ones. I did envy people with Mario and drug wars on their calculators though.
I played the heck out of some space trading game based on drug wars I think. You “flew” around between planets buying and selling cargo.
I would love to play something like that again on my phone.
Re: Ti-84 Evo
#339Summary of the comments in here:
* I used the programming functionality of the calculator to get around the rules
* I didn't care much for the math, but my TI calculator was my first programming experience and it's what got me to love programming
My experience is similar. We were allowed to use our TI-85s in class, but we had to go up to the teacher before the test and show him that we were running a factory reset, to prove we had nothing programmed in it to cheat.
My buddy and I had made a two player blackjack game and didn't want to have to retype it after every test. So instead we made a program that mimicked the factory reset process. You would run the program before walking up tot he front.
The only indication something was different was the three little dots in the corner indicating a programming was running, but we just covered that with our thumbs.
Ironically we never used it to cheat, only to not erase our game that we programmed!
Re: Ti-84 Evo
#340price, 165$ which is ridiculous for a device that costs them less than 20$ to build.