Most mind-blowing program for your favorite calculator

[Garth Wilson]

(06-30-2022 03:40 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  although I would not call it "mind blowing" as in the thread title. Rather brute force or "not using the right tool for the job".

LOL. Well, I got the TI-58c in Dec '81 for $100 at Jewelcor (remember those stores, which sold jewelry, electronics, cameras, etc.?), and perhaps a year later was in the right place at the right time to trade it and another $100 for a 59 and printer and some extra modules. I have a friend who paid $3K for an Apple II and extra memory and accessories probably a little before that, and the Commodore 64 would come out just after that for $600 (and monitor, disc drives, etc. were extra). There were no laptops yet, and the home computers were not portable like a calculator that took only a corner in the attache case. I took a class in FORTRAN IV in '82 at the local community college, and of all our assignments, I could get results much faster with my calculator than I could writing out the FORTRAN on coding sheets, going to the computer lab at school and sitting at the card-punch machine, then rubber-banding the set, along with my account number, and putting it in a cubby and coming back a couple of hours later hoping they had run it, only to find a printout of all the reasons it wouldn't run, and have to repeat this non-interactive process. It was kind of like in the movie "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes" (the original from 1969, not the later 1995 one), where Medfield College was given this computer, free, because it was already so outdated.