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Comment by tmh88j | Hacker News Reader

How is the TI-83 forgotten technology? Go to any college or high school classroom and you'll find plenty of them, albeit the 84 and 89 are becoming more common.

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I have no clue why they consider that forgotten. Particularly, in a world where the HP-16C is no longer sold.

I have an HP-12C financial calculator, that I use regularly, and it's still on the original battery.

I understand everyone's HP-10 series nostalgia, but to replace the TI-83 on that list would have to be the HP-48 series. Full graphing and programming capabilities, released 3 years before the TI-83, and of course using the all-but-forgotten RPN.

I love the RPN on the HP-48, but the HP-16C was built for programmers so it will always rate higher for me.

I always wanted an HP-48 in place of my TI-83.... so much so that I ran an HP-48 emulator under Linux. If I was working from a campus lab, I would VNC into my own machine just to run the emulator.

There's a great HP-48 emulator for Android in the play store (and some great TI-8x emulators too).

Not only is it not forgotten, it still costs $110 new on Amazon.

I don't get that either. They are still standard here in the UK in A-level + university courses, are readily available in lots of shops and perfectly good bits of kit (I use a TI86 regularly if I want to "get shit done" still!)

Stuff that does maths doesn't really get old or forgotten.

Slide rules? I have a couple, but never learned more than the basics before the TI-30 came along, and have forgotten most of what I had learned.

Ok I give you that :)

I have my father's and my grandfather's slide rules, but I have no idea how to work them. But they're great geek conversation pieces.

My thought exactly, the 'forgotten' tech would be the TI-92 (my personal favorite)

Oh man, in high school I bought one of the first "dot matrix" screened calculators. I hate to admit it, but I used it once to cheat in a "data processing" class on a COBOL test. Yeah, that makes me really old.

Indeed. I graduated in 2006 and had to buy a TI84.

I still consider it a ripof, considering that it bash about 7mhz and just a few kilobytes of ram.

Agreed. Have you seen the Nspire CAS? It's pretty amazing.

I've seen images and demos of them, just not in person. They do look very interesting. I'd love to get my hands on one.

I have got an older (2006) NSpire CAS with OS 3.2 which I rarely use other than for working out integrals/differentials when I get stuck with pen and paper.

TBH the Nspire CAS is large, clunky, complicated, unintuitive, eats batteries and is not a whole lot faster or more functional than a TI89.

I still however, use a TI86 all the time out of choice as the stat graphing is great (I mainly use it for regression analysis), it does base-N very well, has conversions built in, has a good solver and the programming language is simple enough to fit in my head.

I have a fairly large set of programs I've developed for the TI86 as well for dealing with navigation/triangulation/mapping.

The Nspire CAS is really more of a tool for students. I'd call the point-and-click interface clunky and intuitive--it's not hard to figure out how to do things, it's just going to take you a while to get there. :) I'd imagine if you have software you've written for the TI-86 and are inclined to do integrals and differentials on paper until you get stuck, it's probably not the right tool for you. :)

I agree with you there about the student comment! I do find it poorly integrated though, for example:

To do a linreg on some data and project that past the extents of the dataset requires...

NSpire: create document, create spreadsheet, enter data, create stats plot, analyse->regression->linreg, create graph, plot stat func, set zoom constraints, whack X value in, read Y.

That's just shit, student or not.

TI-86: {1,2,3,4}->xStat, {3,6,8,10}->yStat, catalog->LinReg, Graph, zoom, enter X, done.

Probably right about it not being the right tool.

Anyone want to buy an NSpire CAS? £30 including delivery to the UK :)

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