Big Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math Class

[ijabbott]

(11-26-2019 06:25 PM)cdmackay Wrote:  As I'm sure many others have said, when I was at school in the late 70s, early 80s, Casio was the only option, as far as we were aware. The school recommended it (down to a particular model), and that's what everyone bought. It would have been madness to do anything else.

And I find that still the same now, with my daughter at secondary school, with Casio scientific being the default, and only, choice offered via the school.

When I was at school (taking A-Level exams in 1981, to provide some context), most people used Casios, but there were a few people with TI-30s and Commodores. There weren't any rules about what sort of calculator could be taken to the exam (for those papers that allowed calculators), so I took my FX-502P.

The only person at our school with a HP calculator was one of our chemistry teachers, who I think had a HP-65 and might have upgraded to a HP-67 at some point.