CASIO fx-5200P Scientific Computer teardown

[Dave Britten]

(06-14-2019 09:16 PM)jebem Wrote:  

(06-14-2019 05:21 PM)Eddie W. Shore Wrote:  Why would they create BASIC programming machines with such little memory? I can understand if we are dealing with keystroke.

That is true. Many Casio models of the 80's could have a memory expansion installed to mitigate that limitation.
Also some memory saving came from the way the commands and functions are stored, if I recall it correctly: each one just consumes 1 byte; a line number would take 2 bytes; variable names 1 byte per char; etc.
The big consumers are the variables containers with 8 byte each.

Yeah, the Casios tokenize their BASIC code, but you still lose a couple bytes per line for the line number, and BASIC tends to be a little more "wordy" than the simpler calculator programming language. So 1 KB in the fx-5200P would probably get you about as far as the 422 bytes in the fx-7000G. I think 2 KB is a more realistic minimum where the extra overhead of BASIC starts to be worth the bother.

The PB-100 also has only 1 KB of memory, and can accept the same 1 KB add-on module as the fx-5200P.

And interestingly, the fx-720P has NO internal memory, meaning you can have multiple 2 KB or 4 KB battery-backed memory modules and swap between them for different sets of programs.