Senior Member
Joined: 06/08/2020
Location: CanadaPosts: 290
| Posted: 02:16pm 08 Dec 2020 |
Ah, the TI-57!
The TI-57 was my first calculator, too, and one of the very first electronic devices I learned how to program (a TRS-80 Model 1 was the other). It was quite a powerful little machine, and had all the basics (!) to learn procedural programming: 50 program steps with labels, 8 registers for intermediate results, conditional branching, and an all-purpose GOTO for loops and subs. And, I do remember the proprietary (and anemic...) battery pack. A real pain in the a$$, because you could never be sure if it would last you through an entire school day (“battery anxiety” was a thing even in the 1970s !).
The TI-57 had a big brother, the TI-59, which included a magnetic card reader. It was frightfully expensive so I couldn’t afford it, but I had a friend with one - it was very cool :). Check out the video - the idea was you would save custom functions on the mag strip, then write their names on the strip with a Sharpie so you could invoke them with assignable function keys.
Also note the long delay between the key press and the result appearing on the display. The TI-57 and TI-59 just blanked the display during lengthy calculations, but the designers of the entry-level TI-30 went to the trouble of putting a “working...” animation on the display, which was the last digit of the display doing a circular chase around the 7-segment LED. For all I know, it may have been the first appearance of the ubiquitous “spinning widget” you see on all contemporary computers.
Edited 2020-12-09 00:45 by RetroJoe