There was a time when cell phones weren’t in the hands of every teenager. I’m talking about when beepers/pagers were a growing segment in the market and you still had to go to the payphone to make a call. Yeah, back then.
Back then, before the internet was everywhere, I was pretty stoked when I found out that the Texas Instruments TI-83 Plus Graphing Calculator could share programs with a little data cord. It wasn’t really the sharing that was the cool part. It was the simple games that you could play on the LCD screen using the arrow keys.
I remember the game clearly. You would control a caret symbol (the space ship) as asterisk marks (asteroids) would scroll down. Your mission was to move the space ship left and right avoiding the asteroids to see how far you could go before crashing. When you crashed, the calculator would display a number. That number would represent the amount of lines that you successfully cleared. Screwing off in class was awesome!
Fast forward to today’s technology. A huge number of people are armed with smart phones, which are essentially mini-computers. It’s become normal to have a sophisticated piece of technology that can fit in our pockets. Think about it. That device that can fit in your pocket can perform more complex calculations than old computers that took up the size of a large warehouse. It should only be normal that a calculator used in math class be redesigned to catch up with the rest of the world.
Introducing the Texas Instruments TI-84 Plus Graphics Calculator. Say what? It’s a graphing calculator in full color, with a 240 x 320 pixel backlit display. It has all of the functionality of a graphing calculator that you’re used to, but it has higher resolution. Higher resolution means that you can graph nicer lines and curves without the huge clunky dots/squares that used to reign king. You can even import pictures if you want to.
Not that I condone it, but in this day and age, where all mobile phones are suspect at school, a color screen for a game on an unlikely platform is heaven sent. Go ahead, put it in your search box. You know you want to.
Seriously though. If you don’t own one, don’t have access to a second-hand one, and need one – this baby is it.
In the meantime, writing this post has made me nostalgic. I think I might have to go find the asteroids game and figure out how to get it back on my ancient TI-83.
Talk to me, Goose.