Random obsolete technologies to reminisce about

I’m pretty sure the TI-83 we had to get for calculus was not much cheaper. More, if you consider inflation.

Wait, they are making kids get a calculator for… trig and crap?

Yep. Everything from algebra up.

I remember I had to buy one of those big honking TI calculators for a graduate level finance course, since I guess only those can calculate time value of money or some such. Still got it too, though it’s not like I really need it anymore.

Something to be said to forcing children to doing math mechanically as well as understanding the concepts intuitively. You need to do both to really understand things. But, I’m talking out of my ass, I have no idea how they are teaching math these days at high school level.

A million times, this. They have planned obsolescence, as well; the hardware in them hasn’t changed much, but you can hit a roadblock with older non-upgradeable versions of software which forces a family to buy another for the next kid in line instead of reusing the sibling’s device.

Really? The TI-36X is about the best calculator money can buy.

OTOH, i use the HP 33 every day, because RPN. I also find it easier to program custom multivariable equations in it. The TI-36X will do higher math and is better suited for science, where the HP 33/35 is better suited for engineering.

Oh, don’t get wrong; the calculators are great. It’s the mandated pairing with the school systems which creates the racket.

edit - I kan spel (although I kind of liked the idea of paring)

On a more recent front… I wish Apple still made dedicated music devices, like the iPod Shuffle. I want to give one of those tiny ones to my daughter for Christmas but used/new ones stockpiled elsewhere are super pricey.

Why do people use calculators instead of say…laptops with R or matlab? Is it purely for students who are taking tests, and isn’t applicable to the real world, or are calculators good for something?

http://i.imgur.com/ur5Ra.jpg

Laptops cost more than a TI, many families have no computing device other than a phone in the USA. ok 56% have a PC, 61% have a laptop in 2015 but that leaves 40% of households without a PC.

It would be pretty trivial to make an app that is feature equivalent to a TI 8x, it probably already exists.

But even then, requiring students to have a phone would be more expensive than requiring the calculator.

I think the issue is indeed that using phones or laptops on exams is usually forbidden. There’s a 99 cent TI-83 knockoff app on iOS—I just looked.

I still have mine from the 90s. Is there a market for old ones?

Is that a Plus, an SE, SE/30 or what?

Was that you back then? You look about 12 or something. I used to use Macs too, but I was like 28 when the SE/30 came out (I had one for a while).

BTW, tonight on my Mom’s dining room table I spotted of all things a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk version of Microsoft Flight Simulator 1 for DOS (from the 80’s!), in its sleeve. Somehow my brother who lived with me for about 12 years had taken it from my house, decided he didn’t want it anymore, and had taken it to her place so she could ask me if I wanted it. I have enough useless cruft lying around, thanks, so in the garbage it went.

I vaguely remember my mom having something like that when I was a little kid in the mid-1960s. So trippy.

I think @wumpus stated it was an SE? =)
That’s me yeah, donning fake glasses about 10-11 years old. I only ever had PC’s after that one (around 98 I think, when we got our first home PC), but now I’m a new owner of a MacBook and completely at loss what to do with it.

Do you have a table that wobbles? Or maybe a door that hits the wall?

What kind of Macbook? The newer ones are pretty slick machines (but as always, way overpriced because Apple). They’re mostly built to a high standard (although there have been exceptions, judging from my brother’s experience), but always cheap out on the included RAM and storage for a given price point, which never ceases to rile me. The OS is somewhat different–I last regularly used Macs back in the System 8.6 days (almost 20 years ago) and went over to the “Dark Side” in '99 when they cancelled the then-planned port of Half-Life–which they finally got around to doing for MacOS 10.x about what, 12 years later?

Anyway, my point is that I don’t know MacOS intimately these days but it can’t be that hard to figure out if you play around with it.

It’s the newest one, a 12’’ tiny and pretty little thing. It’s just that I’ve been so used to using PC’s for the last 20 years, and living without a home computer of any kind for the last … well, 6 years, really only using my iPhone for everything else (I work at a computer all day so I can take care of other stuff there), that I’m just eyeing it suspiciously and using it for… well nothing else than Qt3 at the moment.
The thought was to start writing a bit more this year, but It’d be nice if I could also finally come around to play some games on it that I’ve been missing out on if it’s powerful enough =)

Specs:

1.2GHz dual-core 7th-generation Intel Core m3 processor
Turbo Boost up to 3.0GHz
8GB 1866MHz LPDDR3 memory
256GB SSD storage1
Intel HD Graphics 615