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Comment by easton | Hacker News Reader

At least in the US, most schools are still on the TI train. People have others, but most of the the time they suggest you get a TI-84, which is still super expensive and still a Z80

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Maybe I will check this Sonic port out.

I had to get a TI-84 Plus CE for a college course I took a few years back. I'm an RPN guy so it pained me, but it's a nice step up from the 1990s style TI calculators. It has a fast Z80 family processor, plenty of RAM, a decent 320x240 color display, and a built-in battery that's rechargeable by USB. Usability for everything I used it for is quite good (matrix functions and some root-finding) and almost self-explanatory.

I take it out of the drawer it's in about once a year or so and standby battery life is extremely good. It must cut off power completely in standby.

The TI-84+ battery life was bananas. I used it constantly during university and almost never had to change them.

8-bit CPUs like the 6502 and Z80 are much better for teaching assembly language than something monstrous like the x86. ARM and MIPS are probably okay too.

TI made assembly officially available for a while (starting on the ti-86, I think), but they've walked it back and current calculators need help to get to it.

TI83 had a hidden "asm(" command, it was "Send(9prgmXXXXXXXX", which takes in a hex file then packs it to address 9327. But because it kept two copies of the program in memory (one double size, one half size), people went on to make assembly shells to relocate the program to 9327 without the need for a double-size program. The final assembly shell Venus manged to be absolutely tiny, and did not need to "install" itself (by intentionally creating a memory leak).

Tools exist that can reassemble 8080 assembly language code to run on the 8086 or later x86 CPUs. The opcodes aren't quite the same, but they're close enough feature wise. Indeed it was one of the original design criteria for the 8086 to be source compatible with 8080 code.

At least back in the Stone Age, the TI-84 is for engineering. They made another one that did matrices for business students. The teacher didn’t care that the TI-84 had software that could simulate the matrix functions. By god, TI mailed her a free TI—86 and that’s what we were using. Google says now they’ve all got a matrix button, so that’s nice.

Casios were leagues ahead, tho.

The TI-84 came out in 2004 which I have a hard time calling Stone Age for anything calculator related, graphing or otherwise. But if you were born in 2000 or so perhaps it feels that way. This is also getting well past the time calculators were marketed heavily outside the education market anyway. Also the 84 really is an enhanced 83 which is solidly targeted as a secondary education machine. TI would even sell them etched with “School Property”

https://brownmath.com/ti83/diff8384.htm#Catalog

In the Stone Age of graphing calculators (80s-90s), HP was dominant in engineering disciplines (and France).

Now I think maybe you’re confusing with the TI-85 (but the TI-86 was a TI-85 replacement and handles matrices just fine and superior to the 84) - so then perhaps your teacher had a TI-83. That would be more plausible and sensible.

It was a Ti-83 vs Ti-85.

The first two models were TI-81 and 85. According to my math teacher, it was the years the team lead graduated high school and college, so they were the HS and college level calculators.

Which is ultimately a US school problem, as most countries don't have exclusivity deals with calculator companies, TI, Casio and HP all get in, plus whatever fits the requirements.

It not being changed in decades appears to imply there isn't really something families see as a problem, versus others.

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