Paying tribute to the amazing efforts of ti89 and ti84 communities

[pier4r]

Even in a HP based forum, I think the topic is ok.

I have a ti89 that some 10 years ago was kindly given it to me by a university colleague that saw me tinkering with the 50g, and said "I don't use this anymore, do you want to have it?". That impressed me a lot. Sometimes people can do acts that are, wow.

Therefore, since it was a gift, I tried to use it every now an then. Now let's be honest, as calculator it is way powerful than a scientific calculator. Although my sharp el506w is super easy to use and the ti89 requires a bit more clicking around.

For entry level programming it is not that bad too. To me what is missing is the USB power source. For this the 50g is unbeatable in my heart.

Anyway what is really amazing is the effort that the community produced to create software for the TI devices.
The calculator can already provide a lot of joy helping solving math problems, but the amount of quite polished additional programs is amazing. Especially games.

Now, as I would expect from everyone visiting this forum related to "old but gold" tech, I appreciate devices like a gameboy. The gameboy (and similar devices) is one of the great technological solution that mankind produced to solve a problem, namely providing a mobile platform to execute not that trivial algorithms(games).

My brother had a gameboy, but if I had one I would try to buy those games that ensure that I will continue to use the gameboy over time. For instance buying evergreen challenging games like pacman, tetris, chess and the like. Not games that once they are completed, there is not much to do.

Back to the TI community. Over the years people put so much effort on the system (and still do, see cemetech forums), that practically one can use the ti89 as a powerful calculator (and that is already golden) or even as a sort of gameboy. All the major challenging evergreen titles are covered with polished programs. There is chess (the wonderful tichess), there is pacman, there is tetris and much more. Most of them ported in assembler.

That of course wouldn't be possible without the calculator community. The device can be as powerful as one wishes but if people do not develop solutions for it, one has the basic functions (that admittedly are still plenty).

I see that the 48 series had similar efforts in terms of breadth of topics covered. From applications, to libraries, to games, etc....

The 50g has some amazing solutions developed for it (multistopwatch, list libraries, hpgcc, newrpl, etc..) but mostly the most polished solutions focus on serious stuff (and that's great) rather than leisure or other usages.