OT Ancient TI programmable calculator with red LED display?

Anybody else had one? I don't remember the year, but it was a long
long time ago, in a galaxy far far away. It had a rechargeable
battery pack that lasted only a short while driving a red LED
display. I vaguely recall it had several registers ABCDEF that could
contain values, or something like that. I wonder if that was before
Apple started with its rudimentary PCs.

On 6/14/2011 11:10 PM, John Doe wrote:
Anybody else had one? I don't remember the year, but it was a long
long time ago, in a galaxy far far away. It had a rechargeable
battery pack that lasted only a short while driving a red LED
display. I vaguely recall it had several registers ABCDEF that could
contain values, or something like that. I wonder if that was before
Apple started with its rudimentary PCs.
Perhaps it was the very first TI programmable, which also included a
card reader? I got mine in 1974 when it was introduced.

http://www.rskey.org/detail.asp?manu...ts&model=SR-52

After looking... Mine might have been a Texas Instruments
Programmable 57, probably not the very first year they came out,
maybe 1978.

On Tue, 15 Jun 2011, John Doe wrote:

Anybody else had one? I don't remember the year, but it was a long
long time ago, in a galaxy far far away. It had a rechargeable
battery pack that lasted only a short while driving a red LED
display. I vaguely recall it had several registers ABCDEF that could
contain values, or something like that. I wonder if that was before
Apple started with its rudimentary PCs.

All calculators for what at the time seemed a long time had LED displays.
They generally did have rechargeable batteries because they drew a fare
amount of current with those displays. People forget that for a while
digital watches meant LED displays, and you had to press a button to see
the time, since the battery would barely last if the display was kept on
all the time. It's only in retrospect that LED displays lasted only a
short time on calculators and watches.

And there were a bunch of programmable calculators, from TI and others.
It didn't really take that long from the time the HP-35 was introduced in
1972 before there were programmable calculators of the same size. The
magnetic cards came along fast from both HP and TI, but there were others
that just had memory. I seem to recall that National had a cheap
programmable calculator fairly early on.

HP had a programmable in 1974, TI must have been around that time too.
TI had their SR-52 out in 1974, no magnetic cards, no programmable
modules.

To some extent, they were a fad, coming between the HP-35 that was a bold
move forward and small computers that tended to make programmables less
unique. Byte routinely covered programmable calculators for a brief few
years, they were seen as computers like the rest. There was one upmanship
as TI and HP jockeyed to be better than the other, and I'm sure there were
people who went through them all, wanting to have whater the latest best
was.

A lot of the features disappaered, made all simpler by semiconductor costs
making more programmable space cheap, and advances meaning the RAM could
be kept alive with just a trickle from the battery so whatever you'd
programmed in didn't keep disappearing and thus require magnetic strips to
reload it.

So programmable calculators faded to the background, they are still out
there, but somewhere over there. The period when you could get all kinds
of gizmos for them disappeared, so that base for the TI that allowed their
calculators to print is just a collector's item, as is the wave of pocket
calculators that were put in bigger boxes to make them desktop
calculators.

Steve Wozniak sold his HP calculator (and Steve Jobs sold his VW van) in
order to start Apple. I don't think the model was ever specified,
remember the HP-35 was hundreds of dollars when it came out, and likely
still carried a reasonable resale value at the time.

Michael

On Wed, 15 Jun 2011 03:10:05 +0000, John Doe rearranged some electrons to
say:

Anybody else had one? I don't remember the year, but it was a long long
time ago, in a galaxy far far away. It had a rechargeable battery pack
that lasted only a short while driving a red LED display. I vaguely
recall it had several registers ABCDEF that could contain values, or
something like that. I wonder if that was before Apple started with its
rudimentary PCs.

I still have an HP34C which I bought in 1980 for a few hundred dollars.
It comes in handy when I don't want to wait for my pathetically slow
computer to boot. It has features that you have to spend a lot on
something like Matlab for... numerical integration, for example.

On Jun 14, 11:10 pm, John Doe wrote:
Anybody else had one? I don't remember the year, but it was a long
long time ago, in a galaxy far far away. It had a rechargeable
battery pack that lasted only a short while driving a red LED
display. I vaguely recall it had several registers ABCDEF that could
contain values, or something like that. I wonder if that was before
Apple started with its rudimentary PCs.

Have a Tandy PC (Sharp/Casio). BASIC programming. Relatively cheap
for writing a program then. Under $50.

Not that long ago picked up a Casio fx-7400G+
Got it for a $15 steal off a bottom-surfing site's overstock (not a
problem replacing a Chinese manual with an English download). Thing's
great, though time spent with reviews, some people really do want to
spend that $100+ on other "known name" programmable graphing calcs.

On 15 Jun 2011 03:10:05 GMT, John Doe wrote:

Anybody else had one? I don't remember the year, but it was a long
long time ago, in a galaxy far far away. It had a rechargeable
battery pack that lasted only a short while driving a red LED
display. I vaguely recall it had several registers ABCDEF that could
contain values, or something like that. I wonder if that was before
Apple started with its rudimentary PCs.

I had something simliar at least. It's been so long I can't recall
all the details. The battery life bit was real pain.

I still have my TI-59. I programmed the hell out of it back in the day.
--
"If brute force doesn't solve your problems, then you aren't using
enough."

On 15 Jun 2011 03:19:01 GMT, John Doe wrote:

After looking... Mine might have been a Texas Instruments
Programmable 57, probably not the very first year they came out,
maybe 1978.

I had a TI57 bought around 1980. It's what got me into computers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-57
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On Wed, 15 Jun 2011 20:50:30 -0700, Bug Dout
put finger to keyboard and composed:

I still have my TI-59.

Likewise. It had twice the performance, twice as much memory and half
the price of the closest HP calculator in its day. It also had a
printer interface and several ROM packs. The keypad was lousy, though.

BTW, I much prefer algebraic notation to RPN. I reckon that a
calculator should be designed to accommodate my thought pattern, not
its own. In fact I suspect that the reason that HP didn't produce an
algebraic user interface was that it would have required extra effort
by their engineers. Instead they employed some clever marketing to
turn this deficiency into an asset. flame suit on

BTW, underneath the TI-59's algebraic interface was a transparent
multilevel stack. This stack could be accessed using undocumented op
codes. These op codes could be entered by cleverly editing other
keyboard-accessible op codes.

- Franc Zabkar
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