Don't Update Your TI-83 or TI-84 Calculator's Firmware:
It's weird to think about using a calculator in 2020, when just about everyone has a smartphone or laptop within reach, but Texas Instruments' calculators are still a popular (and often required) resource for students. The latest calculators are even capable of installing and running simple applications, which makes them an excellent learning tool for coders and hardware modders. (I even modded my TI calculator to run respectable facsimiles of Doom and Super Mario back in college.)
Unfortunately, Texas Instrument is removing support of the C assembly coding language in a new firmware update to crack down on cheating. And that means a lot of homebrew programs are either going to go away entirely or have to be converted to a much slower Python version—if that's even plausible.
The update affects the TI-84 Plus CE, TI-83 Plus CE-T, and the TI-83 Premium CE calculators. Texas Instruments says it's implementing the change to stop students from installing third-party software that circumvents the "exam mode" limitation on certain TI devices. Exam mode is designed to restrict certain functionality so students can complete their work without the help of extra features—cheating, basically.
[...] That said, TI-83 and TI-84 calculator firmware must be manually downloaded to your PC and updated over USB, so users who want to remain on the older version can do so by simply not installing the new firmware—but that's your only option.
What was the most interesting thing you created that ran on a calculator?
See also: TI removes access to assembly programs on the TI-83 Premium CE
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday May 30 2020, @08:04PM (2 children)
There's over 20 years of programming that has been done for the TI-83/84 lineup.
The Cemetech and Ti-Calc communities are even claiming that this move will actually hurt exam security:
https://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16652&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight= [cemetech.net]
https://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/149/149342.html [ticalc.org]
These devices don't get as much attention as they did before now that there are so many cheap and powerful ARM devices like Raspberry Pi, but there was still plenty of hacking and programming to be done. Luckily, it looks like only the bleeding edge color models are affected so far.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by captain normal on Saturday May 30 2020, @09:53PM (1 child)
Really...in my opinion using a calculator on math, science and engineering exams is cheating. I had to use a slide rule. (on a side note so are word processors cheating, and using google for research)
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @11:06PM
I forgot to take a calculator to an exam once. It was quite liberating showing my workings in full. Managed a pass still. In many ways much prefer the exam with nothing but a pencil and a formula sheet, or even just the pencil, except they usually dumb those down to multiple choice.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @08:17PM
Damn you TI
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday May 30 2020, @08:22PM (5 children)
Nothing fancy as I recall it now -- probably something that solved cubic equations. It took a bit of doing due to the limited space per program. I guess modern calculators comes with such things out-of-the-box now, but it didn't back in the day. I recall using the graph-plotting function put a serious drain on the battery (4-5 buttoncells), might have been a CASIO issue.
Once I reached university I never actually used a handheld calculator again. Instead they put the emphasis on doings maths in your head and most of the time the numbers are picked to be suited for such things or you just give answers in a suitable form instead, usually as fractions. Using calculators was for engineers and physicists -- and as we all knew/know those people are not even real mathematicians. For everything that needs or needed computations there was always Mathlab (or C), these days I guess there is a lot of R and Python.
https://xkcd.com/435/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @11:47PM
TI has used regular batteries in their calculators since the ti-81 model. Calculations that you'd likely want to make were more limited by calculation speed than battery life.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Sunday May 31 2020, @06:34AM (3 children)
Even in Physics eventually a calculator became less and less useful. In the first few semesters you're crunching numbers a lot but after that you're mostly solving equations symbolically. Perhaps the TI-89 series might have been some assistance, but I didn't have one of those. After my semester year in college I actually ditched the graphing calculator from high school and went back to a TI-30 Solar because when I did have to do some calculations it was plenty adequate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2020, @01:39PM
I knew a guy when I was in graduate school for physics who was taking his Ph.D. written quals. For the exam we all had to clear our calculators, which he did. On the exam was a problem that he got stuck on involving differential equations or something. He programmed his calculator to numerically solve it (damn theorists). He passed the exam. I assume he got credit for that problem.
These were the real TI calculators. They were (and are still) insanely useful.
(Score: 1) by TomTheFighter on Monday June 01 2020, @04:15PM (1 child)
>. .. went back to a TI-30 Solar because when I did have to do some calculations it was plenty adequate.
Oh that brought back memories - I got through Trig for Engineering with a TI-31 Solar - couldn't afford one of those fancy graphing calculators.
I still have that TI-31 on my desk - over 30 years old and it works like a champ !
(Score: 3, Interesting) by toddestan on Monday June 01 2020, @11:29PM
That TI-30 Solar served me well for a long time until one sad day I dropped it on the floor, putting a crack through the solar cell. It was sad watching the LCD fade knowing it wasn't coming back.
I actually still have the calculator in a junk bin, should I manage to somehow acquire an appropriate solar cell to revive it.
I also had a TI-36 Solar for a while (one of the older ones, with the single line display), which was a nice calculator, though I apparently no longer have it and I have no idea whatever happened to it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rupert Pupnick on Saturday May 30 2020, @08:32PM (1 child)
You can have my HP-11C when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Saturday May 30 2020, @09:09PM
Exactly, although if anyone has a functional HP-16C they might be willing to part with, I would like to chat.
(Score: 3, Funny) by WizardFusion on Saturday May 30 2020, @09:44PM (1 child)
Or you could go old school and annoy everyone in an exam room with a Friden STW10 Mechanical Calculator
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Kd3R_RlXgc&list=PL-_93BVApb58cdHy3Z2sUWtd6q2LsmO2Z [youtube.com]
:D
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @11:07PM
I still have my old Marchant mechanical "four-banger". I calculated my first 30-year mortgage on it ... and typed up the payment schedule on a mechanical typewriter.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @09:48PM (14 children)
Boomers forced everyone to stay home at gunpoint to give Boomers a safe space.
Boomers forced every business to close at gunpoint to give Boomers a safe space.
Boomers forced everyone to wear face masks at gunpoint to give Boomers a safe space.
Boomers caused the worst economic depression in history to give Boomers a safe space.
Whiny entitled Boomers are the worst generation ever to live.
No longer.
Boomers must be made to pay with their lives for crimes against civilization.
The Final Solution to COVID-19 is to exterminate every Boomer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @09:55PM (6 children)
Spammers really need to get a life!
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @09:59PM (5 children)
Get a life? How? What part of "forced everyone to stay home at gunpoint" do you not understand?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @10:15PM (3 children)
The part where you haven't put the gun in your mouth and pulled the trigger yet.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @10:21PM (1 child)
I will outlive you, Boomer.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @10:35PM
Only by a few minutes. We've got a nuclear ICBM with your name on it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @11:12PM
He'd only miss.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday May 31 2020, @01:59PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @10:07PM (1 child)
Hmm, fascination with youth and violence, plus a hated enemy all in one by targeting boomers. But this is more like a beta solution without nationalism.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @10:15PM
Nationalism?
There ain't no countries anymore!
No more good guys!
They're runnin' the whole show!
They own everything, the whole goddamned planet, they can do whatever they want!
(Score: 1, Troll) by captain normal on Saturday May 30 2020, @10:14PM (4 children)
If we're lucky Trump will start a war, reinstate conscription and put your sorry ass in into boot camp. Then you can go try to dodge Chinese and/or Iranian bullets.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @10:18PM (3 children)
Sure that makes perfect sense. Give me a gun. First thing I do with it is kill you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @10:51PM (2 children)
What the hell is your major malfunction?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @11:08PM (1 child)
Hehe hiya joker... this is my rifle, there are many like it...
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Sunday May 31 2020, @02:47AM
no that's your gun. it's too small to be a rifle.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 4, Interesting) by martyb on Saturday May 30 2020, @09:55PM (2 children)
When I started college, a TI-30 [wikipedia.org] was the most popular calculator. Basic math, single memory, some trig and some exponential square root stuff. LED display powered by a 9-volt battery. And relatively affordable at around $25. That was still a lot of money when minimum wage was only $2.65 per hour.
After seeing a classmate's TI-35 (IIRC), it didn't take long for me to get one, too. The neat thing was that it could be programed. Well, kinda-sorta. Start recording, do some key strokes, end recording. Enter a number and then replay the recording. I can't remember for certain, but I think 16 steps was the max. Using what was on the display and what was in memory provided two inputs. Though terribly limited, surprisingly complex things could be accomplished. Especially since this was around the time when the original TRS-80 was introduced and IBM was still years away from introducing its PC!
Quite by accident, a classmate and I were playing around with our calculators and noticed some occasional static on the radio station we were listening to. Took a bit of sleuthing, but we finally deduced that the LED display was spewing out RF noise. Some quick experimenting while running up and down the AM/FM dials found a suitably sensitive frequency.
Next up, we discovered that the number of lit segments affected the sound output through the radio. (These were classic 7-segment LED displays.) After some more experimenting, we were able to program the calculator to play a rudimentary rhythm by altering the display from "88888888" to "1" and back again. Woo Hoo! Actually, it sounded more like: buzz, pause, buzz buzz, pause. But we were still thrilled to pieces!
Context: there were no CD players or MP3s or digital songs of any kind at that time. So we were pretty amazed at what we could do. We wished even then for more memory so we could get longer 'songs'. If we'd known a bit more about hardware, there's a chance we could have been in on the ground floor of digital music. I had even correctly envisioned at that time that high-speed playing at different volumes would allow the recording and playing of any kind of sound... we were SO close!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 01 2020, @09:50PM (1 child)
Look junior, we were playing music on our IBM line printers WAY before that.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Monday June 01 2020, @10:57PM
Sounds interesting... how'd you do it? I presume it was on an IBM mainframe? The ones I'm familiar with (IBM/370) were all record oriented, so it probably wasn't just straight assembler code, right?
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @10:07PM (2 children)
TI has a seriously broken business model. Calculator hardware is quite expensive given the relatively limited power it actually has. These are very expensive devices that are targeted almost at a single market, which is schools. They rely on schools either purchasing large orders of calculators or requiring parents and students to do so. If TI made their devices more useful in other markets, they wouldn't rely on educators as their sole market.
There's also an issue of lazy teachers, who could write better exams that wouldn't be as conducive to cheating. I teach college classes occasionally and have started releasing the entire pool of multiple choice test questions to students before the exam. They get a random selection on their actual exam but are responsible for learning the entire pool. If they go through, look up the answers for themselves, and memorize the answers, I've forced them to learn the material at some point. Students don't get to use any materials on the exam, so there's no issue. Other times, I allow students to bring notes into the exam, but the entire exam is based on solving problems and applying their knowledge. If instructors can't write good exams, they share in the blame for the cheating.
I was a TI-Files staff member a long time ago. There were three big sites in the community at that time: ticalc.org, TI-Files, and Dimension-TI. Only ticalc.org has survived and TI-Files is sadly long defunct. I got a TI-89 within about a month of it being released and was very excited about improved support for assembly language programming.
On the TI-85, memory backups to a computer contained an entire image of the RAM. There was a "custom" menu that would allow users to add frequently used functions to a menu. This was actually implemented as pointers to addresses in memory. The backups were modified to add a string variable containing z80 instructions, and an entry was added to the custom menu to point to the address of the string variable. This allowed for the execution of arbitrary code on the calculator and was soon used to create shells like ZShell and Usgard that could run other string variables containing z80 code and provided other useful functionality. This simplified the process for users, allowing them to transfer strings with assembly language programs rather than a full memory backup when they wanted to add more programs. This was a hack, whereas newer models like the TI-83 and TI-89 officially supported assembly language programs and didn't require such hacks. TI was once very supportive of the community and was forward thinking enough to understand that assembly language developers were actually helping their business.
I don't recall anyone in the community having any interest in finding ways for students to cheat. We were mostly interested in finding creative ways to push the limits of the calculator hardware and the large majority of the software released was games. The small memory size on the TI-85 (~28K actually available to the user) was a limitation for more sophisticated games on the platform, but relatively small games like ztetris were still quite fun. The larger memory of the TI-89, the 68k processor, and the larger screen increased the complexity of games that developers could create. I don't think any of the big three sites actually had any interest in hosting software to help students cheat. Most of our software was actually games.
I used to frequently visit the big TI community IRC channels, which were #ti (mostly for ticalc.org back then) and #ti-files on EFNet. I don't ever recall there being any discussion of how to cheat with calculators. Most of it had nothing to do with TI calculators, and when we did talk about calculators, it wasn't about cheating in class. A lot of the time, it was responding to questions about the sites, programming, or helping users solve problems with their calculators. I still visit #tcpa occasionally to this day, where some members of the community still visit. It's a good community that's been very supportive and helpful to TI over the years. We're not interested in helping cheat on exams. Most of us have been out of school for a long time and still have some involvement because we enjoy it. This is a middle finger to a community that has written a lot of free software over almost three decades and helped to increase the popularity of TI's calculators.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @10:45PM (1 child)
TI calculator hardware is quite expensive because TI has ingenuously created their own monopoly market. The standardized tests allow calculators, but only approved ones (and notably, TI's are the approved models). Which means students are forced into buying a particular TI model off the approved list if they want a calculator to use on the standardized tests. Which means TI has created a forced monopoly market.
And how did TI's calculators end up on the standardized tests approved lists, why TI's marketing of course. TI pushed to get their calculators on the approved list, so they could then be the sole supplier of calculators for the tests. At which point, the student either pays TI's inflated price, or does without a calculator. And in this day and age, no student is going to pick the "do without" path.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Sunday May 31 2020, @08:05AM
I understand that TI have a monopoly position in North America, but their calculators are a rarity in Europe. In the UK, Casio calculators are dominant, with a smattering of Sharp and various minority brands. Some schools might recommend a model to pupils/parents, but there's no manding one (with the possible exception of some private schools). Exam boards will specify features that aren't permitted on a calculator, as opposed to whitelisting specific calculators.
On the other hand, programmable calculators are virtually unheard of in high schools, so we've not got that software ecosystem to lose in the first place.
(Score: 1) by Boxbot on Saturday May 30 2020, @10:26PM
Even slower than the current C assembly coding language? That sounds incredibly limiting to me and would be a real loss. I got my start programming on a TI-85, because of the convenience of having it with me.
did I ... did I miss anything important?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by leon_the_cat on Saturday May 30 2020, @11:10PM
I mean giving them reduced tools to do a task. Are they waiting for the apocalypse when TI calculators wil obviously only work with reduced funtionality this will prevent bridges collapsing? Seems nothing more than an old tradition that has outlasted it welcome in a new era. Schools it seems are unable to adapt and learn.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2020, @12:02AM
The compiler has no alignment. Both sizeof(int) and sizeof(void*) are 3. Yes, a 3. There is a lovely int24_t, but sadly the calculator won't do 24-bit color. The screen is only 16-bit. (LOL, "only", in a calculator that would be fine with 4-bit color)
(Score: 2) by ledow on Sunday May 31 2020, @07:08PM
Back in the day, I had a TI-85 (Z80-based, with TI-Basic).
Because I bought it in the summer before term would start, I taught myself how to program it quite quickly. I never got into machine code, however, that risked breaking things and at the time the Internet wasn't really a thing I had access to.
By the September, other people were buying the same calculator to play the games that I was writing - Othello/Reversi with a computer player, poker, Minesweeper, all sorts. The link cable got a lot of use!
The first kind of "smartphone"-like device I ever really had... battery powered, long-life, could carry it around, with a screen, etc.
I uploaded all my games to some TI fan site at some point, and I still have an emulator for it on my current smartphone.
I can remember the frustration of having to break the BASIC programs into different programs (which you could call as almost "subroutines) to overcome size limits, and lots of tricks with variable names and command shortening to get the programs as small as possible. Basically had my own set of "libraries" in effect, which people also needed to run my games.
Great fun, great memories. And I always preferred the syntax of storing variables - A+B->C rather than C=A+B.