1996
by Berg
1996
Image Text: College board issues aside, I have fond memories of TI-Basic, writing in it a 3D graphing engine and a stock market analyzer. With enough patience, I could make anything... but friends. (Although, with my chatterbot experiments, I certainly tried)
Ok gang- quicker post than is my custom tonight. I'm on the West Coast, it's late, and I need to be up in the morning. At any rate, here goes nothing:
As is well understood by anybody who has even a passing familiarity with the Singularity, there has been a stunning amount of progress in pretty much any measurable dimension of technology in the past 14 years. In today's comic, we laugh at our prior naivete, pointing out that what would be a non-functionally awful computer now was considered state of the art in 1996. Likewise with a Palm Pilot, arguably a precursor to today's omnipresent smartphones. Texas Instrument calculators, however, appear to have been left behind, not having made any significant advances since the newly discovered issues of Computer Shopper were published. Thus, while we groan at how awful our state of the art technologies truly were in 1996, we are reminded that some technologies have remained in relative stasis over the years.
The image text reminds us that when they were new, TI calculators (I had a TI-86, m'self) were relatively powerful tools if you knew how to use them. TI-Basic was a fairly versatile programming language that could be used to make anything from games to reference files to computational programs. If it wasn't for the ability to program a TI calculator to make it look like you didn't have any programs on it, I would have lost my copies of Tetris and Nibbles a dozen times over as my paranoid Chem professor went around deleting programs willy-nilly before tests.
The second half of the image text is a reminder to those of us who felt like Gods for knowing how to program that power comes at a price- in this case, the power to program a calculator costs friends. Since no program yet devised can truly pass a Turing test, even the most sophisticated Chatterbot (programs designed to mimic conversation) can't quite qualify as a friend. Someday, though... someday...
July 19th, 2010
Somehow, you are missing the fourth panel.
And while all other technology items have gone down in price (I bought a brand new computer for $199, and an awesome cell phone for $50), the TI calculators still cost about the same amount, despite being the same technology, as in 1996.
July 19th, 2010
The last panel also comments on the poor quality of the display and the lack of progress of TI. IMO, it’s because of the lack of competition on the market and the narrow niche that their devices occupy. They could be replaced by an iPhone with the right app, except that phones are not allowed during exams.
July 19th, 2010
Hrm… that fourth panel is indeed missing. I’ll go muck about and see what I can do to make it appear
July 19th, 2010
Yeah, Texas Instruments seemingly will never charge below $30 for one of their graphic calculators, even though they know darn well that the technology inside them can easily be made and manufactured for $30 today.
July 19th, 2010
Small quibble: I think the progress of technology over the past 14+ years is perfectly understandable without any reference to or familiarity with “the Singularity.” I myself hadn’t heard of the concept until I started reading Dresden Codak.
July 20th, 2010
Personally, I never had a TI. But I worshipped my 48SX, and later my two GXes. I graduated from college before the later HP models came out, but I still consider plunking down for a real calculator I can hold in my hands (even though as a computer geek, I only use a calculator about once a month). In the meantime, I get by with Emu49 and the HP50G ROMs. And the first thing I do is set the thing to RPL. Algebraic entry is great until you grok RPL with a nice fat stack. I spent an entire year of high school maniacally programming that thing (no BASIC for me – tons of stack manipulation, though).
Looks like F# has implemented units of measure (see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/andrewkennedy/archive/2008/08/29/units-of-measure-in-f-part-one-introducing-units.aspx ) which implements the support HPs had decades ago for manipulating values with attached units and verifying everything.
July 20th, 2010
Again, with TI being almost a required posession at schools, they have no reason to innovate. I can download PocketCAS for iPhone at the price of $10.00 As soon as colleges open up what tools students are allowed to use, TI will either catch up or fall behind. In fact, they often lobby universities and states to preserve their monopoly in education. Buy something decent and schools, stop being so paranoid.
July 22nd, 2010
Exactly, Tengwar. Aside from paranoid school requiremants (kickbacks?) there is NO reason for a dedicated calculator in 2010, aside from dollar-store cheapies.
July 27th, 2010
iPhone (or other smartphone) + Wolfram|Alpha = win. I have zero need to use my overpriced TI-89, which cannot form beautiful three-dimensional graphs, solve differential equations, or use external data. What else can I use to plot primorial(7) * sqrt(x!) * y^3 or convert 5USD to Japanese yen with real-time exchange rates?
July 26th, 2010
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