Submitted by In the mid-to-late 2000s, you either knew, or were, that kid in grade school. You know. The one who could put games on your graphing calculator. You may be surprised to learn that some of these people didn’t exist totally in a vacuum. There was in fact a thriving scene of hackers who had bent these calculators to their will, writing games, math software, and more generally hacking on the platform just for the sake of it.
True to my interests, it’s all deeply embedded, pushing the limits of platforms that were obsolete when they were released. I’ll take you through some of the highlights of Texas Instruments calculator hacking done over the past two and a half decades, along with an explanation of why these projects are so technically impressive.
A friend of mine and I at high school bought the data transfer cable for our graphing calculators so we could play multiplayer Bomberman on them in class. Good times.
Unfortunately, my early days addiction to the HP-67, which grew through the 28s into a full blown relationship with the HP-50g, meant the Ti was evil incarnate and never crossed my threshold!
Although I admit flirting with the Radio Shack TRS80 and also the Casio FX-850P, but it was always HP for me!
Because of the very one sided nature of America I quite caring what obsessive Americans do. It’s always American companies or American IT leaders or American products. The whole conversation is dominated by America, America, America because they destroyed everything else.
Take your pills.
ARM isn’t American, it’s been bought by the Chinese since the Tory government sold it off, like they sold everything else off that’s British.
Us english-speaking westerners will be quite heavily influenced by American companies, because that’s where a lot of the tech companies are based. But there’s still a lot of countries with home-grown IT companies, like China (believe it or not, not everything is a clone of western ideas), Russia, and India. But because they have more of a dominance in their domestic markets, we don’t hear of it.
*Why* (and who exactly, and when) did they sell it off? Just to raise money? You’d think that the UK government would want to have a “national champion”.. (But then, I’m not familiar with UK politics at the time)
“*Why* (and who exactly, and when) did they sell it off? Just to raise money?”
They didn’t. @The123King is over-excited.
What happened is that ARM sold ARM off to Softbank, who are Japanese (Chinese, Japanese, eh, who’s checking? Oh wait, I remember, its a huge difference, especially when it comes to national interests).
The Tory government declined to step in and stop it being sold off to Softbank. They didn’t stop it because 1) It didn’t breach any specific law or rule and they didn’t want to be seen to be unfriendly to investment and, 2) They have an ideological attachment to cheering on foreign investment.
Sometimes that approach is right, such as with Pinewood, which would be shooting Carry On Subsidising 25 by now if it wasn’t for American money.
Sometime that approach is wrong, such as, in my view, with ARM. ARM shouldn’t have been sold outside the UK. But the British state is not very good at seeing assets as assets.
Now Softbank want to sell ARM to the GeForce people, which would probably be worse for Britain as at least Softbank just left ARM alone.
Nvidia are also not Chinese, just FYI 123King.
Btw, Softbank is selling ARM because Saudi-backed fund (Vision Fund) got a bit wasted with bad investments and Covid.
Well I suppose I’m lucky I’m not American.
Back in the old engineering days it was HP RPN for dough, Ti for show!
I’m ashamed to say I still have all those calcs, on top of a bunch of very fine Japanese slide rules, as well as a cadre of desktop emulations.
I’m off to press a few very satisfyingly nice clicky buttons and stare longingly into the warm red glow!
You clearly don’t care. In fact, you don’t care sooo much that you took the time to post about how much you don’t care.
And we are all better because of it.
@kochise, @123king
I’m not responding to ignorant trolls with a grudge.
Well then don’t post if you don’t want people picking your house-of-cards arguments apart.
You’re not picking anything apart. What you are demonstrating is you haven’t paid attention to multiple posts over the past few months where I quantified my position. I’ve named everything from individual companies to entire sectorswhich have been bulldozed by the US and, yes, I more than aware of relative industrial capabilities of various Western and none Western states. The pair of you can jog on.
America have always been arrogant and invasive, it’s an imperial construction anyway. Yet, what would Apple do without LG or SAMSUNG’s screens or HYNIX memory chips ? There are companies outside USA and the USA knows it all too well, that’s why they are showing muscle to avoid frontal competition where USA cannot compete. Asian people are not less smarter than USA’s engineers. They just don’t give a fuck about sending people to the moon to prove a point. Their “way of life” is different and they value something else, which terrorize USA’s leaders because despite all the USA’s promotion of their “way of life” and values, they cannot extend their influence endlessly. That’s why they are using the “bulldozing” tactics under the false pretense of “democracy” and such when it’s plain obvious they are embargoing countries that doesn’t play the USA way (Venezuela for petrol, mostly). Next is going bigger into pacific to control China’s goods transportation. WTO ? Seriously…
Only since World War Two. Prior to that it was the European states, There was a definitive role swap after both world wars decimated the European powers’ wealth. And in the the case of Britain there was also a disproportionate loss of the so called “privileged” young men. That was a positive term then. They tended to occupy the officer class and were targets. Just kids. Very sad and the practice of rank by class was pretty dumb as well. Changed the arrogance of the nation IMO. Kings of the world became kings of comedy, great motorbikes and cool cars. British science fiction was also a class above for a while. And we have already talked about the microcomputer revolution there.
I believe a role flip is happening right now as well. China is on the up, even if ARM is actually Japanese. America is morphing into a more of a corporate defined entity with less of a unifying core identity. The UK and the EU might dissolve a bit as well.
Thom, just an idle thought: Ever thought of auto-banning certain members from responding to certain other members? Might cool things off, if WordPress has a plug-in for that.
Thom Holwerda,
Yeah, I dabbled in low level programming and installed the alt-OS too. Awesome stuff. It’s a damn shame TI’s newest firmwares lock owners out of native code execution.
https://www.hackster.io/news/texas-instruments-under-fire-for-removing-asm-c-programming-features-from-ti-83-ti-84-calculators-ba55bdcb0547
Another instance of, new generations being denied owner freedoms of the past.
I fondly remember writing a full back-propagation neural network on my Casio fx-7700 in class circa 1992.
Didn’t know about the software based grayscale on TI calculators.
I did it last century on Sharp Pocket Computers, but the CPU wasn’t quite fast enough for flicker-free full screen swap on large screen calculators (PC-1360, …)
Treza,
It’s kind of like (ab)using pwm on microcontrollers to produce analog output, this is the way a lot of LED circuits change brightness without having adjustable voltage/current regulation circuitry. If you connect a capacitor you can get fairly noise-free output. I’ve used this to drive mosfets, but the results are not that linear and forcing the mosfets to act as resisters makes them fairly inefficient. A buck/boost converter works better, but still the simplicity of rapid on/off pulsing is still pretty cool.
This is the same principal some people used with TI calculators to play music out of the data port.
Funnily enough, I was just working through this on an STM32 Devboard, of course the modern devices will be running upwards of 100Mhz not 8Mhz! A project requiring a spoken word alert on a sensor, what goes around comes around!
I remember my TI-89 in high school. During calculus class my teacher would come by and make sure nobody had stored notes on their calculator. I had stored a digital photo of my teacher in all the lo-res 4-color greyscale glory. He just looked at it and shook his head and didn’t bother wiping my memory.
FunkyELF,
A bit off topic, but…
The emphasis on memorization over problem solving frequently annoyed me in school. Personally I think problem solving skills have served me far better in real life than memorization or tedious manual computation. There’s a reason we leave those tasks to computers. Once you start introducing calculators and technology into the curriculum, it’s time to encourage students to actually use them to their full potential as they would in the real world. IMHO students are best served by learning how to use technology efficiently without limitations, after all don’t we want them to find ways to push the bounds of technology? Using technology to make things easier is what enables us to master ever more powerful abstractions.
I never used TI calculators very much, but my favorite game on them was a homebrew port of Link’s Awakening for the 83+.
It was pretty dang neat.
I never understood why an exam calculator needs stored programs, much less stored programs written in assembly, but I am glad it happened.