So, believe it or not, this thread is inspired by my recently enrolling in college. I'm taking a math and science class to start jarring my rusty old brain and, needing a calculator, I dusted off my old Radio Shack scientific calculator. I far prefer it to some other modern piece of garbage I have floating around here somewhere. Alas, time has not been kind to it and I have already ordered a modern Sharp that I am very much looking forward to and amazed at the price. I still plan to watch ebay for a nice example of my old standby but here it is:



So, way back when, I was a sort of self-described Radio Shack nerd. I related this tale once before but I used to spend a lot of time in a particular store in Rhode Island while my parents were grocery shopping. It so happened that a lightening storm destroyed a TV of mine so I picked up this little gem:



It was actually so terrible to try to watch that I returned it and picked up #4:



*******, obviously working for commission that he held near and dear, treated me like crap after that. If I had my forty years of grouchiness then that I have now I would have had a field day. Anyway, all of this stuff is out of the 1986 Radio Shack catalog. Most all of them can be viewed at this wonderful site. It is very interesting, I think, especially for those of us who remember much of this stuff, to look at how all of these various technologies have changed as well as the store model itself. Go into Radio Shack today and look for a Radio Shack calculator or Tandy computer!

Cool, what kind of degree are you looking into? And I thought people back then memorized tables for various numbers that these scientific calculators provide for.

I plan to pursue a degree in architectural landscaping but for now I'm trying to just reestablish the basics. I want to concentrate on math and science for now but I plan to take any basic course I can at one of the community colleges that teach on post that is entirely state subsidized resulting in no money out of pocket or from my VA benefits.

My professor, when asked about graphing calculators, says "I don't know, I've never used one." That saved me from overbuying as I don't need one now. I think I made a good choice with the one I ordered and for less than twenty dollars at that.

My great-grandpa had that portable TV on the right. Not a bad little box.

If you like cool gadgets, you should try a TI-83SE calculator. Very useful, fun to program, very durable.

Hmm, calculators, I own one of these


It's just awesome...

I like gadgets and I considered getting an 83, 84, or HP 50 but they're all overkill right now. I was >this close< to getting an HP 50 on ebay the other day.

Ti-83 sucked balls, all versions.

Go big, roll with the 89

Wussy calculators without symbolic manipulation. Ha!

I bought my TI-83 Plus back in 2000 in the 8th grade and it's a brick **** house. Still use it almost every day to this day. I've dropped it on pavement/tiles school floors literally HUNDREDS of times, thrown my backpack containing it great distances forgetting it's in there, and even had it stolen for a full year (during which they ground off all my name engravings with a dremel) before eventually getting it back.

For these reasons I would have no issues recommending a used one from craigslist for eBay. You can probably find one for $20 - $40 and it will take you many years into college math (through calc 3 at least, much farther depending on how much you want to rely on a calculator).

The 84 is just an updated 83 and functions exactly the same.



Yes, an 89 is much more powerful as it provides things like algebraic manipulation and antiderivatives but in my experience most instructors won't let you use a 89 on exams where 83s and 84s have always been fair game.

I wanted an 89 but I had to settle for the 86. But it got me into programming.

I still have my TI-83+ too! High five! And I'll need it soon for I, too, have re-enrolled in college!

TI-83+'s are amazing, I got mine in 2006 for 100$. It survived having some Sulfuric Acid spilt on it.

TI-83 sucks. Seriously.

I'm sorry that you need your calculator to think for you.

Wow, I guess you really like Radio Shack!

RADIOSHOCK

Shock radio?

you're the one who posted the thread!

Hoo Ahh, nice one!

hehe I love how one of the "features" of that calculator is "Works in almost any light!"

Back then indoor light could be a problem.

Exactly, TI-83 is on the line between "Just adds numbers" and "A whole damn computer".
Also it's indestructible.

Hardly.

I used the TI-89 to write programs to solve equations, which was way easier than using a TI-83 and doing 4 pages of math by hand every time I had to find thread pitch on a non-iso standard metric bolt by using wire size.

I've never seen a Texas Instruments calculator that wasn't really ****ing durable, so I find this to be a moot point.

My father still has his from school, and they still work.

I'm surprised that you're even allowed to use one.

really? Isn't not allowing calculators more of a grade school thing? By high school most teachers recognize that you already know how to add and subtract, so allow you to use a calculator to work faster.

Even in high school, we weren't allowed to use calculators for anything until we'd already passed a test on whatever subject without one. Graphing, algebra, trig, etc.

And even when we could, we could never use anything higher than a TI-84. Didn't help much anyway, since my teachers usually only gave us arithmetic that we could usually do in our heads anyway. Anything that we would normally use a calculator for required showing work on the tests anyway, thus making it irrelevant.

Calculators are used more in science and engineering classes. In math classes, both in high school and the dozen or so I took in college, calculators were a rarity.

No, calculating the sums and products of finite sequences is more of a grade school thing. In university math a calculator will either slow you down or utterly annihilate whatever problem you're supposed to be learning to solve, with absolutely no overlap between the two options.

The situation would be different if P=NP of course, but then there'd be no point in studying mathematics at all.

Not everyone really needs a TI-89. Unless you're going to do more than Calculus I, you probably shouldnt bother with it. Though it does have much more functionality.

I rarely use one. I generally work the problem on paper and then when I'm left with some series of numbers to be multiplied and divided I use it. And since I've never had a use for a graphing calculator, or I should say a need, I'm going to stick with non-graphing sci-calcs until I either have a need or a requirement to use something else.

Oh, and Jon'C could have had fun and said that he was surprised I could even use one because he assumed I was taking grade school level courses! That would have been funny.

Do you even know where you're talking about? Some functions just can't be integrated, and some functions just can't be derived. I calculator is able to help a whole lot in those cases.
Most schools even have the rule that you have to prove that you did a certain question 'from the top of your head', by writing down every single step you made. A calculator is just a great way of checking your answer...

I don't think anyone really gets a TI-89 for the "graphing" aspect of it. It's just really convenient to have a big screen where you can scroll through your history, copy-paste numbers from this history, and also check very easily to see if any long expression you put in was typed in correctly. It's also nice to get numbers in fraction form. The only one with these capabilities that doesn't have QWERTY is the TI-89 (it was back in around '98/'99 anyway, among the TI calcs).

If you have some money to blow and you're going to be dabbling in engineering, definitely get the TI-89. It has helped me immensely from middle school to freshman-level calculus (including vector calc and all that jazz). The ability to do symbolic integration/differentiation, solve systems of equations in seconds, is extremely convenient. Not so much when you go into ordinary diff. eqs., partial diff. eqs., etc., but you might not even get there. It's probably even MORE useless if you're going into pure math. But **** pure math.

The TI-83s had a history, showed multi-line for long equations, and could show numbers in fraction form...

Also, I've even seen some higher end basic scientific calcs that had history and could convert to fractions.

In Canada RadioShack technically is still around.. They've just changed their name to The Source.

83+s could also run basic applications/programs. Though the memory and processing power was pretty weak, by TI standards.

In the US Radio Shack technically is still around.. They've just changed their name to RadioShack.

Whatever happened to that "The Shack" rebranding that was supposed to go on?

They refer to themselves like that on their website and in commercials.