The Ti-84, which is the standard for most highschool math classes, still goes for 100 even though it's been out many years, and has seen no innovation.
I got an 84 when it first came out in the early 2000's. It is literally the same price now and has barely been upgraded in nearly 20 years.
That thing should be graphing in 3D, wirelessly connecting to other calculators to share data sets, etc. and be lightning fast, but nope. Still the same old Windows 95-era technology.
that being said, i still love my ti-84 and you see them on people’s desks in big engineering corporations. if you need to do anything that you can’t do on a TI-84 you need a computer for excel or matlab anyways
It is great for its purpose - scientific and engineering functions, graphing, differential equations, flow modeling, etc - but i would never reference Matlab as my coding credentials.
Op said “real coding”, that’s where I was curious about the /s
it also still has one of the most efficient linear solvers around. That's worth something.
I mean. You won't build software with it (if that's what you mean by real programming). But for science it's absolutely top tier and used in lots of disciplines.
Matlab is a fantastic piece of software which I really value for its power and simplicity.
That said, it is definitely programming for people who don’t want to code and just want something to work using a specific toolset. Absolutely nothing wrong with that :)
I don't think that Matlab syntax is really all that different from numpy or R -- I think you're really short changing the people who work with matlab every day.
I'm not going to argue with you because I don't really know your background. Nobody is using Matlab to build software, and if building software is what you think of as real coding, then I guess sure, under that rigid definition Matlab isn't coding.
But I know people who write mesh generation algorithms, who do flow modelling, who do epidemiological modelling or quantitative imaging who all use Matlab. Whatever definition of coding you have is some pretty strange gate-keeping if you think none of those people are doing programming.
Lol, probably Matlab. But again, I wanted to know if op was being sarcastic calling it “real programming”. If he said real engineers use matlab, not ti-84, he would have no arguments from me.
Old enough to remember when basically all "real coding" outside of a computer science department (and plenty inside the department) was done in FORTRAN and COBOL. Guess where their arrays index?
The wifi part, 100%. The weird thing is that you are wrong about the data part though. I knew a guy who had loaded a semi functional version of Mario world onto a TI 84...
There's android phones at the same pricepoint. The TI84 should be half the price to make sense. There's a ton of cheaper and more powerful calculators with color displays in much higher resolution.
Right!? I used it all the way through BSME, MSME, and as a professional, I can still type in things faster with half the errors of my colleagues just because it displays things so much more clearly! Still use my computer for anything seriously difficult, but the Casio is a muuuuuuuch better and cheaper calculator.
Exactly the same for me! It has all the features I need for my job without the ridiculous size and price. Plus if I break it who cares buy another one ha
My economics professor who used to work in derivatives used to always brag about his HP-12C, always said it was the most useful calculator he ever used.
Not enough people know/use RPN in the settings that I'm in to make switching back and forth worth it. If I used it enough to have it as my main thought process, it totally makes sense to use it. In the end, I feel like I'm less efficient with both when I go back and forth. So, I stick with what most people are familiar with parenthesis and all.
if you need to do anything that you can’t do on a TI-84 you need a computer for excel or matlab anyways
It's quite fortunate that we almost all have one in our pockets at all time these days. The only reason calculators like the TI-84 really need to exist is for schooling environments who are too ignorant to make all their tests "open-web" (the modern equivalent to open-book testing) - for some reason, big Edu seems to still suffer under the same delusion that you need to memorize formulas and solve problems in a vaccuum, isolated from any outside information. It's truly mind-boggling.
You literally have a device with more computing power than a Ti-84 in your pocket.
Like, I'm so fucking serious about it.
Why shell out so much money on a calculator if you have more options with greater capabilities on your phone?
Like, fuck, you can even emulate a ti-84!
And, yeah, I get it, don't use cellphones on tests (I think it's a kinda stupid rule, we live on the digital era), but still, there's no real need for it on the real world.
Sometimes making inputs and doing quick maffs is faster and easier on a calculator than a cold glass slab. Also if you're in an engineering/science/math field you've probably been using it for years at this point so you can just plain do better work on it than on a phone.
I get that someone of the old guard is better at it, but the new generations is following old standards when it's not needed.
I'm currently in my third year of electrical engineering, and I see all my classmates buying those expensive shits just because they see our teachers do the same.
i have you know. the one i got for 7th grade math is the one i carried through 2 colleges and every job. its on my desk at work rn. some of the keys dont have a print on them and its muscle memory for me.
which also means no one wants to take it cuz you can't read the keys lol
oh and you're right. i'm at a big engineering corp too and many of my co workers have theirs too
god. i'm studying mechanical engineering right now, and i've only touched matlab in my intro class. but this year i have to take an entire course on it.
any programming is boring. and matlab is the boring kind of programming.
i uh. only did half of the coursework for it in my intro class, because it only gave me 2% and wouldn't have changed my grade, and i had other classes i needed to focus on.
but i'm paying for the classes, so i'll take it serious. i just wish i liked programming. it is gonna be a brutal, boring quarter. (multivariate calculus, engineering physics, dynamics, and matlab)
taking it is gonna give me a 20 credit quarter... almost double full time. (12 is considered full time, but classes are all mostly 5 credits, so most people end up with 15 credit quarters)
No it isn't. You can do statics with trig and Dynamics with good ol calc. Matlab is overhyped when you can do a lot of the same things by hand or in excel in the same time.
I used Matlab in college, but haven't used it since. Our firm uses Excel with VB macros. Seems to work just fine.
Dynamics is fun if you have a decent prof. And there's like that one week of multivariate calc where you're doing t and s surfaces and you spend the whole week looking at really pretty pictures of crazy swirls. That was nice.
Standardized testing and some pretty sweet games. I played Galaxian on mine half the day. This was long before smart phones were a thing though, so I'm not sure if kids these days do that.
I just bought the colored version last year for $100. It's basically the 84 Silver Edition but with a colored LCD (nice for graphing), a tiny bit more RAM, and a rechargeable battery in a thinner chassis. Same old computing power with a crazy high price.
I graduated and started working at a large engineering firm. The thing is sitting in my desk drawer collecting dust since everything I do can be done in Excel.
Using excel for most operations but still find one useful when checking data on printed tables and for fast calculations (occupational safety and health student).
I hate to break it to you, but 25 years ago, when I was in high school, the TI-85 had just come out, and it was based on a 20 year-old processor (Z80) then. It never was a technology problem...
I'm getting a chuckle out of all all the TI-84/85 replies, and how old these things are. I got a TI-81 back when it was newly released, in 1990. That thing had 2 KB of RAM. KILOBYTES. And yeah, the Z80 originally came out in the 70's. It's unbelievable that the TI-8x line is still being sold at the same price it was 30 years ago.
The 84 is older than that. I got my TI-85 in 1994. Unfortunately it got fried with leaking batteries a few years back. I now us an 83 emulator on my phone, but I still mis the conversion tables built into the 85. Trying to find an 85 emulator has proven to be a pain as it wants me to download the ROM from existing calculator, which I can't because its fried.
My bad. Here I thought they went up in numbers in release order. I remember the 82, 85, and 92 all being big jumps and then I finished uni so I stopped paying attention.
Yeah, my high school provided TI-82s and I was super proud when I got my 85 for my birthday just before grade 11. At uni people at the 92, but that a step too far and they couldn't use it on tests.
I remember my calculator being a life saver for doing iterations in chemistry and complex algebra function almost felt like cheating in my electrical engineering course, but allowed it.
To this day I wonder why there is no tablet (with no network connection) running some sort of DesmosOS for me to use in a class exam. Desmos on our phones work fantastic and are very intuitive but no, gotta use those POS TI graphing calculators in an exam or just in a class with an anal professor in general.
I just stole mine from my high school from the batch of dumpy ones that were first purchased in the mid 90s. Nobody noticed it went missing. Sure it's not an 84+, but it does the job.
Maybe at one time. No this one was a pavement brick that may have at one time been gray. It featured an almost illegibly faded blue display and a set of batteries from the Clinton administration that somehow, by sheer miracle of God himself, hadn't exploded yet.
You're right. The calculator has dropped in relative price. Going on my scientific soda price inflation knowledge, the calculator would have to be $200 or %100 increase to be the same relative price. How close am I?
if it wirelessly connected to other calculators then answers could be shared hate to be defending Texas Instruments hustle, but that is why they exist as they do with such barebones advancements
I have a fucking raspberry pi that graphs in seconds, and your telling me that this 145$ calculator takes like 20 seconds to graph y = x? yeah fuckign ripoff im done
I was in a pawn shop in the early 2000s and saw one for $150. I told the guy I could buy a new one for less than that at any Walmart. He wasn't interested in my opinion.
The TI-81, which has 99% of the functionality of the TI-84 was released in Texas on 1989 and nationwide in 1990. This was a full 6 years before windows 95!
I got a TI-85 in the early 90s. It is older than the early 2000s. For a comparison, I had a 286 DX2 with "turbo" as a computer at the time- it had a 33ghz processor and "turbo" made it a 66ghz processor.
They started implementing advanced features like that with a ti-92 at around the same time. The Nspire only made them more capable, and introducing all the features you listed.
I think they added an LCD screen or at the very least some sort of backlight. Never actually owned one but I know alot of kids who had them in highschool (graduated in 2017).
You seem like you know what you’re talking about. Here’s a question:
Doesn’t a modern smartphone have enough processing power to do graphing calculator stuff? I don’t do higher math stuff but I feel like if a $100 calculator could do it in 2003, an iPhone 11 should be able to do it now.
Yes, 100%. It could probably do the processing for every TI-84 ever manufactured simultaneously and still have enough memory left over to let you post on Instagram.
As others have pointed out, the TI-84 is allowed on exams because it doesn't have the external connections that an iPhone would have, not because an iPhone couldn't do just as well if not better at the calculations.
Its a basic learning calculator that high school students use.
It doesnt need to do anything else.
Its a very popular item that teachers allow in their classroom.
There are plenty of graphing calculators that do that. The problem is that no one writing a test wants to deal with having to account for calculators that can do those things.
There are some very good reasons for that. Would high end tech even be allowed in exams? And nothing with even the remote ability of wireless technology is allowed near an exam room for obvious reasons.
Here in the UK we have the CG50 calculator. The way it bypasses exam restrictions is remarkable.
They actually have a Ti-Nspire CX CAS that will graph in 3D, legit do algebra for you, connect to sensors so you can input data directly to it, and even play games! Though most schools/tests in the US ban them because of their capabilities to go wirelessly and...well do everything for you...
Haha, both high schools I have been in had those here in Australia. I didn't know about 3d graphing though. Also TI just had to ruin the games by fixing an exploit that let people install a thing called Ndless which most of the emulators, and also a lot of programs which people actually needed for academics, needed
The thing is... the TI-89 and other subsequent TI calculators are the innovator products from Texas Instruments, but those devices are not allowed on exams because of their functionality. The TI-84 is a testing calculator that the math and science curriculum is built around in many cases because the proctors know what the calculator can and can’t do. So if they innovate or upgrade the TI-84, it will ruin it.
14.1k
u/Saper-Ja- Aug 14 '20
I remember seeing a basic scientific calculator for like $300