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

[Dave Britten]

(06-21-2015 08:33 PM)Nigel (UK) Wrote:  

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

Yeah, the entry history is great, though the 36X Pro matches it quite well in that regard.

One of the nicest things about the programming capabilities is that you can make programs and functions. You're a bit more limited in what you can do in a function, but they allow returning a value, and thus extending what's built in. HP users are used to this capability, though, since it's just a matter of leaving a return value on the stack.

The X, Y, Z, and T keys are nice for CAS work, but general text entry suffers. Would be interesting to see if a single multi-tap key for those variables, along with the same characters being available within the alpha layout would work better.