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Comment by eurleif | Hacker News Reader

> no ability to store notes

What? It can run custom programs. Of course it can store notes.

Hell I had a buddy in high school that went through and wrote a custom program that's only function was to perfectly 'emulate' the entire calculators menu system, so that when asked to demonstrate that he had no notes or programs, he could go through the entire process of showing nothing being archived and then wiping the memory.

Dude wound up in the Stanford CS program after high school, so clearly he learned something.

I wonder how many individual variations on this specific functionality have existed or currently exist on TI calculators in the wild. It's common enough that I see it mentioned every time TI calculators are brought up.

When I got my TI-85 (one of the earliest ones), I was one of two kids (the other kid had some $500 HP monstrosity) who had a full-on graphing calculator so "clearing the memory" wasn't even on the teachers' radar. I remember my calculus teacher being impressed that I could simply enter the terms of a binomial equation and it would just spit the answers out. A few years later, TI-83s were simply the required calculator for those classes.

A week or two before the AP calculus exam, my calculus teacher had us all line up to install special software for solving exam problems, and then taught us how to use it.

This wasn't really necessary, as I had enough time remaining to redo the whole test without the programs, and then a third run without the calculator.

Ha! I literally just wrote a reply saying that exact same thing. Crazy to realize how so many kids did this... there should be a club or something. I wonder how good a predictor of doing this in school is of certain lifetime outcome variables...

I did that too.

That's why I said "easily". Yeah you can store programs, but they're really hard to write, and most test proctors know how to clear the memory on a TI calculator, which they require you to do before a test.

Your program doesn't have to be valid BASIC.

It can just be a text document, open it up with the editor.

Anecdotal, and I have been out of school for 5 years or so, but I never once had a teacher or proctor clear the memory on my calculator. Also, storing notes on a TI calc is trivial, you don't need any programming knowledge to do so.

Same here. I feel like I went to school just before teachers caught on to the issue. Either that, or I just got lucky.

Is the program required to be syntactically valid? I assume not in which case you can just type your notes into the program editor.

No, it's not. This is exactly how I used mine. They weren't hard to write at all because they were just direct notes. It wouldn't run as a program but I didn't need/want it to, I'd just 'edit' the program again to see my notes.

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