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Re:The Beautiful TI-108 by nickpsecurity on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @03:59PM (#13990004)
A teardown of the components and why it's so reliable might be interesting.
Re:The Beautiful TI-108 by kens on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @04:32PM (#13990294)
A teardown wouldn't be too interesting; it looks like the calculator is basically just one chip inside: http://www.datamath.org/BASIC/LCD_Modern/JPEG_TI-108.htm Of course, it might be interesting to look inside the chip...
Re:The Beautiful TI-108 by nickpsecurity on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @06:06PM (#13991071)
Now you're thinking what I'm thinking. :) Although, I was interested in the PCB, too, since I figured it might be extra simple. That's a way to reduce cost and improve reliability vs overcomplicated components used in many modern designs. Really, really simple indeed.
Re:The Beautiful TI-108 by kalleboo on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @10:54PM (#13992499)
Even a modern "advanced" calculator like this 2-line model[^] is just a blob chip and keypad matrix. Calculators are all extremely simple until you get to the graphing ones that have external RAM or even flash memory.

[^] http://datamath.org/Sci/Modern/JPEG_TI-30X-IIS_SWH2016.htm