N.C.D. New Calculator Day - TI 89 Titaneum

[Nigel (UK)]

(06-19-2015 06:33 PM)Dave Britten Wrote:  

Jlouis Wrote:  It Is really not friendly for crunching numbers..

I totally agree. If it weren't for the relatively good programmability and nice CAS, I wouldn't touch the thing. I remember when the 89 came out, my big concern was the loss of the QWERTY keyboard. I got an 89 Titanium not too long ago, and discovered my fears were well-founded. (Even the 92 Plus with full keyboard is a bit obnoxious to use.)

Well . . . I got a TI-89 shortly after it came out and I loved it at once. My eyesight was better then and I could read the small (but good contrast) display clearly without glasses (not so easy today!). I'd previously been using a TI-85 at school (I am a physics teacher). What I liked at once about the TI-89 was the fully interactive history of past inputs and outputs and how easy it was to paste a previous result into a new command. Largely because of this I found it great for doing sums.

After a while, I came to appreciate the brave decision to have X, Y, Z, T, and | as unshifted functions. This latter function in particular makes so many CAS operations flow more naturally (in my experience, at least). The CAS is good to use - not as sophisticated as some HP machines but much more straightforward and far less idiosyncratic.

I never really got into the programming language. I suppose that so many things requiring programs were already built in or could be provided with short user-defined functions. However, I remember one of my brightest students being fascinated by it and when she was bored with the pace of the class I would lend her the calculator for the lesson. She enjoyed programming it!

Nigel (UK)