Friday, March 27, 2015
TI 84 Plus CE calculators back to school
Texas Instruments announced last week the TI-84 Plus CE, a new graphing calculator for education, descendant of the TI-83 Plus that many of us have known.
This new calculator will alone the desire to return to school to some who have spent their tray in the 2000s to start the new TI-84 Plus CE has a color screen and backlit – which can seem trivial today, but was not there 10 years – displaying 320 x 240 pixels and 65,536 colors on a diagonal of 2.8 inches. In my time, the TI-83 Plus and other Casio Graph showed 96-128 x 64 pixel monochrome, that is to say, in black or white (if not dark or light green), even in gray scale. There were the Casio Graph 65 RGB pixels, but nuances and no possibility of mixing colors: it showed either bright red, from bright green, bright blue either, and not even black.
In return, the latest Texas Instruments significantly more energy, she embarks therefore a rechargeable battery, which gives it an undisclosed autonomy. My Casio Graph 100 on it still works with batteries that I have left when I passed my degree there nearly 10 years. I still find the inevitable Drugwars, a strategy game turn-some of whom had copied the source code by hand.
At the time, there was no USB port or slot (micro) SD memory card, there was only one serial port at size 3.5 mm, which was used primarily to transfer cribs entered painfully with the ABC keyboard of the calculator. The cable to connect it to a computer was so rare that he who is possessed attracted the envy of girls, which he could transfer full courses. For geeks – the term emerged while ago, and had a pejorative connotation – This cable also allowed to transfer games in assembly, who were of the most powerful graphing calculators faux portable gaming with RPG worthy of Zelda .
Besides, if the amount of memory has been increased a hundredfold, from 24 KB on the TI-83 Plus to 3 MB on the TI-84 Plus CE, CPU power is far from having made the same leap. We’re past that 5 MHz in the 2000 15 MHz today.
The Texas Instruments TI-84 Plus CE modern design will anyway be available in Spring 2015 for an undisclosed price. Emphasize to conclude that HP launched earlier another modern calculator, color touch screen, which would make even more drool older teenagers that many of us have become (below).
TI-84 Plus CE... calculators back to school
