Friday, June 25, 2010

MAJOR miscalculation!!

A horrible thing happened to me today.

I can hardly write. We've been together for almost 15 years, and he fails me now?


Yes, I am sad to report than my TI-86 let me down today. The decimal button stopped working!

I'm not sure how I can move on from my lovely 86. Should I simply buy another (can I even find one anymore?) or is it time to move on to another model?

9 comments:

Scientist said...

:( I have a TI-86 too for about 10 years now, it has a comfortable home (somewhere in my apt) and every once in awhile I come across it. The newer calculators must be pretty awesome.
RIP TI-86

Andrew said...

How sad! I used my TI-86 in the lab a few years ago, spilled some saline on the screen, and the screen died on me. Alas!

Comrade PhysioProf said...

You call yourself a fucking scientist, and you use a calculator with fucking parentheses???? Grow up and get a motherfucking real calculator with RPN.

Unbalanced Reaction said...

Scientist and Andrew: Word! 86ers unite!

Hugs and kisses, CPPy! Love ya!

Doctor Pion said...

Ah, you do know that to "86" something is to get rid of it?

What I always find intriguing about that family of calculators is that they are based on a chip made in 1976, the Z80. Its cpu design is older than you are!

Ironically, given your reference to Word, I think the first true word processor I used (WordStar) ran on a CP/M system that was built on a Z80 rather than an Intel 8080. That means you should have been able to run a word processor on your TI calculator.

(WordStar, which predates M$ Word, was essentially a markup language so I found HTML trivial to pick up when it came along.)

Unbalanced Reaction said...

Yes, thus I might be 86ing my 86. So sad.

Well, my students certainly have put enough TEXT into their calculators to wish they were running a word processor on it!

Jacqueline said...

TI-86? I still use "Old Faithful", my TI-82 from junior high, and I don't know what I'd do if he died! RIP TI-86.

Doctor Pion said...

Your students probably just download the crib cards from TI. I was wondering if your problem was that you couldn't do unit conversions without it. ;-) Even if you can, you might like to know that there is a Casio that has both input and output with symbolic SI prefixes instead of powers of ten.

Jacqueline - Is the TI-82 the one that knows about the analytic continuation of the sine function? See if it gives an imaginary number for the inverse sine of something like 2.

Jacqueline said...

Doctor Pion - I don't think so, it just give me an error when I take the inverse sign of 2.