> Used by millions of American schoolchildren
Europe too :) When I was in high school, TI-84 Plus was the calculator the school told all of us to buy. And I see that stores in my country are still stocking them so I have to assume they are still being bought and used.
Many hours were spent by me and my friends making and showing off little programs in TI-BASIC on those calculators. None of us ever took it all the way to learning Z80 assembly however. I printed a whole manual about Z80 assembly programming for the TI-84 Plus and started reading it but never wrote a single line of assembly for it. Yet.
It depends on the country I guess. In Spain I never saw a person using Texas Instruments calculators. Casio and HP are way more popular.
We had both depending on the school and sometimes even the teacher. fx-9750G and GII didn't support assembly programming... unless you used an undocumented procedure to flash them with unsupported firmware from a different calculator model...
and nobody enforces a calculator model
We were specifically told to buy TI-84 Plus. Also, there was a list of specific brands and specific models that were approved for use on math exams.
If someone wanted to use a Casio instead, they could. But the teachers also said that if you buy a different brand and model other than TI-84 Plus, you are on your own to figure out how to use it for all the different things we needed graphing calculators for.
Everyone in my class did the sensible thing given that they told us this, and bought the TI-84 Plus. There was no reason to buy a different one when our classes assumed the TI-84 Plus. Only making extra problems for oneself.
Same here (actually had a voyage 200, but same same I guess). It's actually quite insulting that TI kept (and keeps?) selling waaay outdated hardware at horrendous prices. It's the SAP/Oracle business model applied to school hardware.
> Same here (actually had a voyage 200, but same same I guess).
Not the same, actually! Unlike the TI-83/84 series, the TI-89, -92, and Voyage-200 all used a 68000 CPU, with a completely different (and much better) operating system.
I wrote a web-based emulator for the Voyage-200 a few years ago: https://woofle.net/v200/
While I agree on bit about horrible prices, the TI calculators are well suited to their intended task[1] so I will object to the outdated hardware part. Stability is a good thing in the context of classrooms. Why should schools be spending money on replacement hardware, software, and textbooks when the curriculum itself is fundamentally unchanged?[2]
[1] Except the screens on the older models were truly horrible, from a brightness and contrast perspective.
[2] From my recollection, the calculators interfaced with hardware and software from other vendors. Then, of course, there was the vendor lock-in provided by textbook publishers.
I found a funny irony that in the country of free market, a calculator model was enforced nation wide in the schools. Here, in Spain, the teacher would only ask to the kids to get a calculator. They never ask for a concrete model or brand. Perhaps, they will only go ask to not get a programmeble calculator.
I agree that you not need to have more powerful calculator. A cheap Casio or HP calculator it's enough for the 99% of time. I keep using my old Casio from my formative years. It's in an interesting calc. Powerful enough to write formulas and complex calculations, but can't store formulas or programs. Just in the nice spot that allowed it to be used in exams.
Not all of Europe, Portugal was all about Casio and HP.