[silverknit3]

I have indeed modded up my TI-89...case. Yes that sliding piece of protection that comes loose after a while. I got bored and covered it in 5 gum wrapper. The color has faded and is tearing up but it's still my baby. Also, tetris is byfar the most entertaining game EVER. I say it rivals facebook tetris and tetris ds.


Also, I have a TI-84 on my Nintendo DS. I never use it though.

 

[Sixteh]

I'm rocking the 89 over here, although the battery on mine seems to die so fast I try not to play games on it. D: Also isn't allowed for a bevy of SAT's and others.

 

[Ashkii21]

When I was in high school, I used a Ti-89 like everyone else. I remember one kid had an HP and he was kind of the odd guy out. Well when I went to college everyone had an HP-48 series calculator. I had to learn the reverse polish notation and I found it a lot easier. I've been using an HP-48g for about 13 years now.

 

[Meliboeus]

I've recently got an HP 50g and after some days of use and some hundreds of pages read from the manual, i've come to understand why people love Hp calcs so much...once you get used to the Rpn notation you forget how to use algebraic input.

UserRPL programming is straightforward when used to implement simple programs, but can reach high levels of complexity through subprograms, advanced commands for manipulating graphics, flexible data type conversions etc..no surprise it's almost unchanged since the 28s from 25 years ago.

The only downside is that i really have to buy another RPN calculator to take with me everyday...i'll look for some ebay auctions on the cheap...

 

[gallardo88]

89 and 50g.

 

[Cankin]

Mine is TI BAII Plus.

Almost all students in my faculty use BAII Plus or BAII Pro and I haven't seen one 12c yet.

 

[celcius]

I'm using a blue TI-83+; I had a black one before it.

 

[cifani090]

What do you guys that is so important about vintage calculators?

 

[Uncle Erik]

For me, it is that they are dedicated stand-alone products for a particular purpose.

I have an excellent HP 12C emulator (by HP) on my iPhone. Works great and I always have a 12C with me. (The 12C is beloved by accounting geeks like me.)

But I have two 12Cs and use them whenever possible. Nostalgia figures in, but I love having a device solely for crunching financial numbers. The build quality is nice and I really enjoy using the real thing. I'll never give it up.

 

[appophylite]

Quote:

What do you guys that is so important about vintage calculators?

,
Experience with the calculator!
 
Honestly, before High School, all the calculators I owned were simple cheapo calculators for basic number crunching (mostly obtained as free-bies and giveaways). Just before starting High School, my father gave me a Casio graphing calculator that got me through High School and the first year of college. It started to fritz out on me in second year after it had an accidental meeting with a snow drift, and I was devastated, because it would be a two week wait to order the new model and no one in town carried a similar model anymore (the newer Casio graphing calculators they had just updated to changed everything. I didn't want to learn how to do everything again on a new calculator because I didn't have the time, but I realized that that was going to happen anyhow. Rather than get the new Casio and learn from scratch again, I borrowed my Dad's new HP 50g+. He wasn't using it anyhow, I'd heard good things about HPs calculators and noticed that the 50g+ was still more similar to the older 48s I used to see than the new Casios were to the older ones. My dad said I could have it because he bought it to upgrade his old HP (28 years old and still going!) and found it was too different and he was too comfortable with his old companion. I've been going about 7 years with my 50g+ now and I expect to go several more years with it as a result. But yes, experience with a calculator definitely trumps bells and whistles. I've seen new students come through my Dad's engineering department who upgrade their calculators every couple of years and my dad, with his 28 years old HP can lay waste to their calculations in terms of speed of processing because he knows his calculator inside out whereas the students have to rack their brains to remember what 4 menus they have to root through and what alternate button they need to push to find the operator they need to solve a specific equation.

 

[Uncle Erik]

Yep, the old HPs hold up. One of my 12Cs has a 1988 date code. I found it for $2 at a junk store and it even had good batteries in it.

That one got me through the accounting degree and it still works great.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned is how efficient they are. I have to charge my iPhone daily, sometimes twice. The 12C goes for two or three years on a set of batteries.

 

[appophylite]

Quite true on the batteries! My Dad's 12c goes forever on a single set of batteries. My 50g+ can go nearly 1.5 years on a set of rechargables before needing to be replaced, whereas my friends' Ti calculators eat batteries for lunch!

 

[logwed]

My venerable TI84 bit the dust late last semester, so I took the opportunity to pick up a TI89 Titanium of good ol' Craigslist. Well, it's quite a bit more complicated, obviously, but with practice I'll get some muscle memory going and I'm sure that I'll be up to speed in no time

 

[nikp]

I've got the Ti-nSpire CAS (the one that's grey not black) and a normal Ti-nSpire. Loved the CAS!

 

[logwed]

Quote:

I've got the Ti-nSpire CAS (the one that's grey not black) and a normal Ti-nSpire. Loved the CAS!

Is there any difference in their capabilities?