New TI-83 Plus

I spent a fair amount of my Grade 10 math class playing with one of those. So much fun to program. As for entering source code by hand, it won't make you learn. Taking the time to go over the code and seeing what it does will make you learn. Entering it by hand will show you how to find various commands.

In Grade 10, my science teachers general rule was that you could have anything on your calculator during tests that you wanted. Before every major test, I threw a complete summary of my notes into a calculator, with a nice system to manage the content. A lot of people did really well in science that year. Of course, I made a spelling mistake in bio, and 95% of the class made the same error.

I spelled it right. I realized the error was there, just too lazy to scroll through that much code to fix it. When you enter data that slowly (when assignments are so unbelievably easy that you can do them in 2 minutes, you have a lot of spare time), you tend to learn the material better than just reading it once.

And of course, there was the small text game I made for one (Source code has long since vanished). It was a cool little adventure game, except for the bug of the Undead Troll. It amused a friend of mine way way too much. I set the variables for the troll to fight when you entered his cave. Thus, if you killed him, left, then came back, he'd be alive and ready to fight again. He also had his 5 pieces of gold back too. And because of the low probability of death, it was possible to get an insane amount of gold, simply by killing the troll over and over.

But there was only one place you could use the gold, and only one thing in the vending machine, so it didn't really matter.

It was a cool little game. I could probably re-implement it in a BASH shell without too much trouble, or maybe something like Python...

I think I know what I'm doing tonight...

A large portion of my life in JR and SR high school was spent on those. Life began on a Casio 6300gx? that was tiny, strange, and couldn't do much. I made it do alot of crap. I moved up to a TI-82 and wrote all sorts of software and games. I enetered into programming partnerships that went no where when the guys with the ideas couldn't program much. It was alweays a one man job... I dropped the bank for a TI-92 when they were new (over $200) 'cause I wanted the baddest and kickin'est calculator next to the HP 48gx. I submitted the "Hello You" code for it here. It has spent a few years mostly unused on the shelf. Sometimes I power it up just to check that the batteries are still okay. I've been planning on the 92+ upgrade forever, but I can't justify getting it if it will still sit there on the shelf...

Shoulda gotten the '84 or, what's IMHO the best calc around, the '89 Platinum. Both have USB built in, and include the cable in the package.

Ive always used the casio CFX-9850G. I could never get my head around the Texas Instruments...