It is a shame that calculators are stuck in the past for silly regulatory reasons, but there is a silver lining. These relics are excellent machines for learning low level programming without the complexity of modern hardware. You can write C code with essentially no operating system underneath you, read the keyboard I/O registers directly, flip pixels on the screen by writing to the framebuffer pointer, write your own interrupt handlers, etc. There are no other widely available computers this simple anymore, and because of their ubiquity there is still an active hobbyist community making new software.

If I was going to make a course on programming I would get every student a calculator and have them write some C on it.

> there is a silver lining. These relics are excellent machines for learning low level programming without the complexity of modern hardware.

My thought exactly. Give kids a calculator app for their phone, and I'm positive far fewer would end up writing code for it - and fewer would end up as developers.

There's something so cool about writing a little game and showing it to your friends when you're in 9th grade. "Dude, you programmed a game on your calculator?! You're a genius" is so fun to hear at 14 years old.

Do you have any knowledge whether there's still much of this going on?

I remember futzing around with TI Basic and downloading/sharing more complex games from others... but we didn't have smartphones then. I just wonder to what extent students still care about that stuff today.

I suppose there's still some appeal from the "look like you're doing work" factor if nothing else.

The Raspberry Pi Pico has opened the door to young experimenters thanks to the MMBasic programming language from Geoff Graham. There are several excellent videos that explain the setup and operation. The Pico is actually available for $4. The software and manual (PDF) are free to download. It is super easy to get started - 5 minutes and you're writing software that can solve problems and control I/O.

PicoMite: Running BASIC on a Raspberry Pi Pico

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxmjy1nz6MM

PicoMiteVGA Raspberry Pi Pico Running BASIC on VGA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIK1ujslHHI

....

Yes yes, but the pico is a lot harder to program during class while looking like you are doing school work.

It's funny reading this thread where everyone is leaning towards "those dang kids and their smartphones are missing out" while ignoring things like Roblox, where entire economies are being built of the creativity of kids

I don’t want economies, I want kids to have genuine, self-directed creative outlets. At best today Roblox is baby’s first hustle culture.

You're kidding right?

Having "Robux" instead of the imaginary karma random forums, or the points different game portals had, or literally just the grind for downloads some people had somehow dashes the incredible stuff kids are inventing for play by other kids?

Kids will not somehow be ruined by having an outward reward for the creativity. It doesn't work like that.

Just to clarify, I don't mean that kids are not programming or making games in whatever form, just that they might not care to do so on a frozen-in-time TI calculator as much as used to be the case, so the "silver lining" of an unnecessarily expensive TI calculator being a child's first programming environment might not really exist anymore. As you say, kids have many other options today.

My son just finished 9th grade and wanted to know about machine language and assembly language. I got him a Digirule 2U from bradsprojects and it clicked immediately. He wrote his first programs by hand and bit-banged them from the front panel, just like I once did on a Cosmac ELF. He found bugs and patched his programs. By playing with it, he learned about addressing modes, self-modifying code, the usefulness of a stack for implementing function calls... all of this he taught himself, in the space of a few afternoons. And just as he understood that programming like this was becoming very tedious, I showed him a symbolic assembler.

Looking on Amazon... TI calculators are running Python nowadays. Much easier to understand but C would be a much better introduction to computing for them :(

TI has never supported C on its calculators. That's part of the fun :)

It supported Assembly officially, which is better to learn how computers actually work, although they seem to have dropped support for it recently.

Oh I thought they'd changed since I was at school :) In my day they only had ASM. Only my C64 was way more capable / interesting.

The NSpire was running Lua at one point…

Yeah, absolutely. I learned to code in middle school in TI Basic during math class (much to my math teacher's dismay), writing little platformer games as a snarl of GOTOs and pixel on-off (because the more robust drawing functions weren't fast enough to do real-time gameplay/animation). Impossible code to read, but I had a lot of fun.

Writing C for the TI-83+ is generally not a very pleasant experience. Now, for the m68k TI-89, that’s a different story.

Could be worse, the contemporaneous up-market option was still HP at the TI-83 time, no? In that case if I recall correctly your only options were reverse polish lisp and assembly...

I learned how to program basic on my 83 over a weekend between my track and field events. Made the calculator much more usable.

I plan to check out https://www.aoz.studio/ its by the guy who wrote the legendary AMOS games programming software for the Amiga and looks a fun way to teach programming

Damn, that would be incredible. Any chance you’d consider making a YouTube series?

I had the privilege of buying two expensive calculators. First, a TI-85 (1993) and then a new math teacher hired was more familiar with the HP-48G (1995) and had us get one. While fun to use to goof off in class, I felt they were like learning to use a slide rule: obsolete before you bought them. Did the small screen and the over-precise numeric answers give us a better idea of what we were doing than pencil and graph paper? Did it make any students appreciate math subjects more?

Having built an RPN evaluator at summer camp, I appreciated that my friends were learning it, too, on the HP-48.

In college, I literally never used it. A simple scientific calculator was almost always more useful.

I'd argue that a sliderule is at least something you can manipulate with your hands and immediately see the output relationship.

Tangent, I use a tape measure at work and you can fold it back on itself to make a basic slide rule for quick addition and subtraction without bothering with fractions :)

There's one thing that calculators can do that powerful modern gadgets cannot: run on AAA batteries.

It doesn't even have to be something as old as TI-83, too. For example, Casio Prizm FX-50 has a color screen, and can be mounted over USB as a storage device. And in terms of hardware power, it's fast enough to run a NES emulator: https://github.com/tswilliamson/nesizm.

(For the curious, here's a dev wiki for this platform: https://prizm.cemetech.net/index.php/Prizm_Programming_Porta...)

In some states of Germany they also lobbied for advanced high school courses to require a Voyage 200 (after you already shelled out for a TI-84+). This thing was pricy and the school ended up having a few units to lend out because not everyone could afford them.

Most of the schools I work with now have their students use Desmos, a free online graphing calculator. So thankfully, we've been moving away from TI.

The NumWorks calculator looks very interesting. Too bad it does not have a RPN mode.

Otherwise the SwissMicros calculators can be recommended. They are all RPN and are modeled after iconic HP calcs. They are just very pricey, especially for non-graphing calcs.

The Omega alternate firmware does have RPN

https://getomega.dev/

My DM42 broke in under 2 weeks and Swissmicros support was completely unreachable. I would strongly recommend getting a used older HP calculator instead.

I had the exact opposite experience. After already owning a DM42, DM41X, and a DM16L, and I bought a DM12L for a client. The screen had several LCD segments that faintly showed as always on. I wrote an email and was contacted by Michael (the founder) almost immediately. He said they'd happily take it back and send me a new one, but it would take a few weeks for shipping from Europe. Instead he suggested that I first try putting it in the oven at 70C (160F for us 'Mericans) for a few hours. So I disassembled it and put just the PCB/display unit in the oven. And sure enough: problem solved!

tl;dr: I thought their service was great.

Although I do love my real HP's, too. I own maybe a dozen. I think the 32sII is my favorite, but I dearly miss my 41CV from back in the day. Maybe I should find a used one of those.

On the programming side: I definitely agree with those saying calculators were/are an entry to programming. My first programs were on an HP-29c. I thought I had invented binary search!

Can I ask when you had this exchange, which email you contacted (I've tried emailing both the support address and the individual addresses) and which email provider you use?

This was in early March 2020 (so, just pre-Covid). I was using [email protected], because I was responding to the invoice they sent me. And I self-host my email server. Hope that helps.

Mine was a hand me down from my older sister. Our public school did have some TI-82s that they lent out for classes, but that wasn’t always the case and the cost of a calculator was certainly a burden on some families.

Meanwhile, on Spain we can use any cheap Casio calculator (really any calculator).

Even without regulation, there's another aspect to know of: how to use the features of your calculators. If your teacher doesn't know the model, you'll be left learning both new class concepts, and new calculator features on your own. It's entirely doable (I always had my casio graph calculator manual with me through the end of high school), but needs more effort.

Casio rules also on the other side of the Iberian penisula.