I wish my area school district could be convinced to downgrade to calculators. Two years ago, I found out students get iPads.
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I run the Free42 app on my phone. It looks and acts just like an HP.
I used log tables in high school. Stepping up to a slide rule was a joy. My first calculator was an HP-45; I was saving up for an HP-35 when the new model was announced. Then came the HP-67 and a slew of later gen calculators, culminating in the HP 32SII which I love. But magnetic card readers fail and buttons grow weak and old, while the Free42 app can be installed every time I get a new phone and it’s always in my pocket.
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Back in my day, we had to do iterative distillation column convergence calculations in the en-gin-earring coursework with a Casio fx-115MS and we liked it. Barefoot, uphill both ways.
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The 1990s are calling and they want their aesthetic back.
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A better early 2010s aesthetic?
Sadly, our pocket supercomputers have killed calculator evolution, so 90s aesthetic is all we got.
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Wow, I was lucky. My handwriting was so terrible, even after sessions with a handwriting tutor, that the school eventually gave up and issued me a laptop in the 5th grade. (Lucky for many reasons: I’m young enough that laptops were fairly common by then; and my school had the resources to do that kind of thing to help a student with special needs.) So I spent my time goofing off and writing games in Javascript (an easy place to start, since the only development tools you need are Notepad/TextEdit and a web browser.)
I tried TA BASIC once and quickly gave up; trying to write a program in a half-assed version of an archaic language on a numerical keypad and tiny display is a pretty awful experience if you have any kind of alternative available.
I hope young students today still get opportunities to goof off on some kind of programmable computer. I worry that schools may do too much to lock down access to computers in the fear that it’ll distract kids from their schoolwork. Then again, I think some middle/high school students are a match for any professional hacker in their ability to get around any technical measures which prevent them from playing video games…
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HP-48G. I taught myself how to program one of those with the help of a company called Educalc. They used to put out a non-glossy catalogue similar to Trader Joes flyer. Those were some nice people at Educalc. I was in Berkeley back in those days (90’s) and I saw a big poster for the HP-48 in a store window. I’d love to have that poster now.
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RPN FTW! 
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Get yourself a good soroban and you’ll be electricity free!
I use m48+, which I assume is the same idea… an HP emulator.
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As an intern I worked on quality assurance for these calculators back in 1997. TI was wonderful to us, paying us well and providing lots of perks. It was a huge improvement for me personally, as I had been working construction in the Texas summer heat before that. My job was basically to behave like an idiot with the calculator, since I have limited math skills. Do the things that the engineers would never think of. My cubicle mate was a kid from mainland China. He knew the math, and it was his job to rigorously test the processes while I tried to bite the buttons off the calculator.
My son has one of their 80-series calculators, and I’m sure my daughter will be using it before too long. Both of their schools also provide calculators to kids who can’t afford it. My daughter’s school also assigns a Chromebook to each kid, but those aren’t allowed to leave the school.
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Part of the point of the TI-84 (and its peers, though you’ll seldom meet them in practice) is being limited.
Testing conditions are substantially trickier to maintain when devices that can trivially run a full-powered computer algebra system and the kitchen sink onboard; and cannot be readily verified to not have a network connection to the outside world.
This doesn’t justify TI’s scam, when a device of suitable power ought to cost a pittance; but it’s difficult to use readily available general purpose devices without substantial cheating risks unless you embrace a device management style somewhere between ‘totalitarian’ and ‘dystopian’.
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Good, fuck TI and fuck Algebra II, an almost worthless class that’s more about learning a specific tool (the calculator) than the math behind it. I took it in high school in 1999 and while I can still do most of the stuff I learned in freshman algebra, I remember almost nothing from Algebra II. I loved the calculator at the time, but mostly just because we used the calculators to play games in class since the teachers couldn’t confiscate them (they were required for algebra, after all).
Not surprised they banned TI-86s, that was what I had and they DID have some powerful features that the TI-84s lacked. They were easy to code for, but operated just slightly differently from 84s so you could, for instance, make a custom program showing the “Memory Cleared” message without actually clearing the memory, which teachers didn’t know how to clear themselves. That meant you could also store notes and such and never have to delete your games, which meant you didn’t need to copy the games back from your friends’ calculator after every test which meant you got to keep all your saves and high scores. Hypothetically, of course, not that I ever made or used such a program, I uh, I just heard about that it could be done. That everybody with a TI-85/86 had my zTetris high scores by the end of the schoolyear is completely unrelated.
Even without blatantly cheating, there was a “Solver” function that could “solve for x” and would work on virtually ANY single variable equation no matter how otherwise complex. That also meant it would solve, in stages, any multi-variable equation too if you could break it down into separate single-variable equations. Sometimes getting the input correct would be more challenging than the equation itself, but it was POWERFUL. When we got to logarithms I was having issues just because there were so many little steps where you could screw up, but I aced the test because I used the Solver function for each equation for the correct answer. If mine didn’t match I could re-work the problem to figure out where I had messed it up. Only person in the class to get 100%. I don’t feel too bad because you still had to know the math: you had to do the work and show step-by-step how you solved it, but knowing the final answer to use as a check and working to that number is very different from doing it correctly the first time and hoping you got it right. And it’s something that the TI-84 owners simply couldn’t do, I was not surprised that 84s were required by the time my little brother took the class and I got to keep my TI-86 for college, which ironically was never required for any of the maths I took.
And now I haven’t used the thing in well over 10 years, it’s in my old backpack still in the back of a closet and I should probably go check it to see of the AAAs have leaked and ruined it. I use Desmos as my go-to calculator at work, found it years ago and I find it easier to use than the windows calculator or my phone app. Also, I’m at a computer anyways, so another Chrome tab open to it is less clutter than a physical calculator at my desk, even if I never need the actual graphing functions of it.
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Their model has always been to give [tech] away for free to textbook companies and force families to buy it at a premium price;
Shitty!
our model is to give [tech] away for free to students, and charge textbook companies to integrate it.
Also shitty! The textbooks are the whole problem; We need a free calculator interface, so neither calculator purchase nor textbook purchase has a trolley toll built in.
And another thing-- if a kid’s family is too poor to buy a calculator for $100ish, it might not resonate with them when you suggest they get an app for the kids’ smart phone instead. If I can correctly remember what it’s like to be poor, that probably sounds like, “let them eat cake.”
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I went to a school where we had to have the HP-34C. It was on that I first learned to program.
