Texas Instruments has long made graphing calculators beloved by school-goers and programmers alike. The calculators are simple, compact computing systems, and entire communities have formed over the years to celebrate the devices’ broad programming capabilities.
All that’s about to change. Texas Instruments is pulling support for C-based and assembly-based programs on both the TI-84 Plus CE — the most popular calculator for sideloading — and the TI-83 Premium CE, its French sibling. The latest firmware for each completely removes the capability and leaves users with no way to roll back to previous versions of the firmware.
Way back when I was in high school, I used to write my own TI-83 programs to… Well, to cheat on tests. These devices were a brand new addition to the education system at the time, and teachers had no clue what we as students were doing with them. One of my best friends and I also bought a communication cable for them so we could share stuff and play multiplayer games together in the back of class.
Removing stuff like this is a terrible idea.
You cheated on tests with the programmable features of the calculator…. and then say that removing those features is a terrible idea. Hmm… I’ve heard of people cheating on them as well during my college tenure, someone even trasmitted test questions wirelessly with one to someone outside the test for an engineering lisensure exam. Many teachers don’t bother to set the calculators into a test mode before test either meaning people like yourself could cheat with them…. personally I think they should have made them such that there is an explicit test button…. that locks out all programability, but even then that would be uncertain…. certainly eliminating programability should ensure vastly reduced prevalence of cheating with calculators.
Frankly I have no sympathy for cheaters if they are caught… since they do nothing but skew expectations for everyone else, and give bad teachers higher performance ratings.
cb88,
I don’t endorse cheating, but killing off a totally legitimate feature sets a terrible precedent. Do you really think it’s wise to make these programmable devices less useful for students & engineers?
In the 90s most teachers simply didn’t allow calculators on exams where rote memorization was being tested because the calculators could store text & formulas. Heck, I had a smart watch that could store formulas too, but it took so long to program that you might as well learn the formulas, haha. Other tests would be “open note” so the programmable calculator wasn’t an advantage, but if you didn’t know the material already you would struggle on the test.
Another philosophy is that we should actually be encouraging students to use every tool at their disposal to get results, that is the attitude that we need to make us effective in the real world. Shunning the technology is completely counterproductive to our education. Rather than stigmatize tools as cheating, we should be encouraging the use of programmable technology, and the teachers themselves could provide the programs themselves and encourage students to use them on tests. Ideally the class would progress with students first learning how to build those tools and then be 100% allowed to use them on tests. “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature”
I normally tend to agree with your assessment here, but there’s also a strong argument to be made that over-dependence on tools is an easy situation to end up in, and can cause significant problems in understanding. or even ability to do things. I distinctly remember how it used to dumbfound my classmates in high-school that I could do 2×2 matrix multiplication faster on paper or in my head than they could on their calculators, and even by the end of that section of the course they _still_ had trouble articulating how to actually do it without a calculator.
I agree, however, frankly I have never ran into a situation in a class…. where I required the calculators programability… and computer engineering is a modestly math heavy degree, its not physics or mechanical engineering but still.
If I need the programability the calculator is probably already getting in my way anyway… and its better to just do that sort of math on a faster to program and faster to calculate device. Basically… smartphones and mobile computers have obviated the need for programmable calculators.
ahferroin7,
I agree with that, but as a programmer I often find that programming an algorithm to solve a problem is a great way to learn the problem and gain expertise. If you don’t understand the topic, then your program isn’t going to work. Our programs are a pretty good reflection of our understanding.
cb88,
My experience in class is the same, however I think that’s in part due to the way classes are taught. I’ve long felt that there was too much emphasis on memorizing things. Frankly, I don’t remember formulas from my school years, it’s really the hard skills I’ve gained through experience that make me a better problem solver. If I had a say I would spend more time learning how to maximize the use of tools to exploring the depths of a subject matter and much less time learning how to be an automaton.
Why do people lately agree with everything, only to disagree later? Just say “that was a valid argument”.
kurkosdr,
What specifically is your objection?
Engineers have Excel, AutoCAD, Matlab, and others in the real world.
As for students, the programming experience of those things is awful. I remember looking at it, and thinking, I have better things to do with my time. 🙂
That’s fine for votech schools where the idea is to get people trained on various tools because employers hire on tools knowledge more than anything else.
That’s not what college is for. College is about learning the theory behind the tools in order to have a better understanding of the world.
I disagree with this. This cuts out the thousands of hours of repetition needed to master a skill, and it also produces worthless graduates who know nothing except how to use their, or their professor’s, specific tools.
The downside is much bigger than the upside of this idea.
Flatland_Spider,
In my opinion the calculators that students use should evolve to include such use cases. Especially now that the handheld technology has advanced so much.
I’ve been to college too. First of all, my opinion is that students should learn how the tools work (courses often come up short in this area) , and like I said in another post they should go as far as learning how to program their own tools.
A solid education can be built by laying solid foundations, and I think everyone needs to learn the basics, but it doesn’t make sense to receive the same education as older generations – the world has changed too much and historically academia had a tendency to become overly focused on memorizing formulas and training students to be human calculators, which isn’t all that valuable anymore. Humans are slow and imperfect as calculators and there’s not much to be gained by doing things the old way at the opportunity cost of a greater mastery of the technology available to us.
So IMHO we should be encouraging students to embrace & sharpen automation skills where ever they can. Abstracting tedious processes in this way enables us to reach higher levels of insightfulness.
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/768/
As far as cheating with the calculator goes, that’s definitely a problem. My teachers had a very simple solution. Tests were either no calculator allowed or you had to show the teacher your calculator and the teacher only allowed non-programmable calculators to be used on tests. In the more advanced classes, the tests were open-note, you could have 1 large index card or 2 (or was it 3?) smaller index cards and you could put formulas or anything else you wanted on them on the test. In those, if a calculator was allowed, programmable calculators were permitted. However, you had to show your work to such a degree that if you used the calculator to cheat you would not be able to show your work sufficiently to get credit for the answer.
On the memory train, I had a Radio Shack TRS-80 PC-1 pocket computer at one point in school. That was a lot of fun. And very helpful, especially in chemistry. Mainly because it was so limited in memory you couldn’t do too much in there, so programming all the important formulas and other details needed for assignments (and yes, tests, but programmable calculators were allowed so no cheating was done) had to be reasonably efficient. I learned more due to programming, testing, and fixing, not to mention repetition when things went bad and I lost the program, that it was the programming of the calculator that ended up as “studying” and helped me remember things for class before I even reached for the calculator or note cards. 🙂
As for removing this functionality, look how that went for Sony and the PS3 when they removed support for Linux. At least in the US, not sure about other parts of the world. In short, if you sell something with a certain feature set, and then you update it and remove something of significance that was considered a common feature, you usually run afoul of various consumer protection laws or likely will face a class action law suit. On the surface, at least, this seems exactly like what Sony did.
I think it’s a bad idea, and should not be done. There are other ways to address cheating, and leaving it to each institution to address would be better. Instead, I suspect it is more about TI wanting to have more control over what people can do with their calculator, and not liking all the hacks people have managed to come up with. Or, perhaps they have plans to change the internals to something that would not support these changes, but probably would be cheaper to manufacture, so by eliminating this they can change the internals but keep the same model numbers and people would be none the wiser. Who knows. Either way I think it’s a bad idea to kill existing functionality.
Next step: an App Store ™ for these calculators with a 30% cut going to Texas Instruments and a $99 yearly subscription fee to be allowed to develop. *just a guess*
DAMMIT! How can us old people have fun?!
spiderdroid,
As an old person, I think programming calculators was a young person’s game, haha. I did it in high school, but these days I’ve got far better tools for both work as well as fun. If it doesn’t have a keyboard I don’t want to program it (*).
* not entirely true… I really enjoy programming micro-controllers! It is as enjoyable today as when I first gave it a go decades ago. The gratification of having full control with bare metal programming is hard to beat!
Why would you do that?
To be fair:
The old models (back in the ’90s) had to be hacked to run assembly-programs.
Indeed. TiGCC was something some hobbyists started, and something TI didn’t squash because they didn’t see it as a problem.
“2020-05-27 5:17 pm
Flatland_Spider
Indeed. TiGCC was something some hobbyists started, and something TI didn’t squash because they didn’t see it as a problem.”
>
>
That was because you had people who basically knew what they were doing back then.
That’s pretty much not the case anymore. (Gnome 3,Iphone ect users)
smashIt,
Actually some of the calculators had to be hacked to run native programs, but some of the TI calculators officially supported it. The TI83 and TI86 had assembly modes if I recall correctly.
https://www.ticalc.org/programming/columns/86-asm/el-helw/lesson1.html
I guess I am not that sympathetic. The primary purpose of these devices is in school. All of the recent engineering grads I know just leave it in their draw and only pull it out to get sentimental about it. Some oldtimers still use theirs (and I have a HP-16C on my desk for when I need to hex math or bit twiddling) but that just isn’t that common.
And yes I am sure *you* (whoever you are) still use yours every day and rely on the custom software you put on it; but can we just agree that it isn’t the norm?
Sometimes it is ok to move on, and enjoy hacking the older generations of hardware
I have a Ti-89 Platinum that’s lost in my closet.
If I need a calculator, I have an iPhone, and I have computers with full keyboards, lots of RAM, tons of libs, and multi-core, OOO, superscaler processors which will smoke that little Ti-84 Plus CE without thinking twice about it.
> I guess I am not that sympathetic. The primary purpose of these devices is in school
Then why not *sell* a custom firmware without this lock for the devs who want it. (maybe even for $99 a year like Apple, if they want to be money-grubbing capitalists) Then implement an easy “teacher lock” at the firmware level?
Not sure how you could *completely* make this hack proof though – I suppose an enterprising student who really wanted to defeat it by buying the unlocked firmware, then hacking it to replicate it to make a “fake teacher lock”. A hardware switch would be harder (TI could put an extra ROM chip, and the “teacher lock” would simple switch the connection from a possible user-installed (flash) chip back the the stock chip).
But if a kid was able and willing to go to the trouble of hacking the firmware to be able to cheat on a test.. That kid should probably just skip high school and go straight to college EE courses.
> Then why not *sell* a custom firmware without this lock for the devs who want it. (maybe even for $99 a year like Apple, if they want to be money-grubbing capitalists) Then implement an easy “teacher lock” at the firmware level?
Because they aren’t interested? Because it would be more trouble than it is worth (remember it can’t just be revenue neutral to be interesting, but make a real profit) ? Because the handful of people who want these features will be able to buy older models on ebay?
I mean, realistically how many people would actually pay your $99/year? I don’t have any data but lets say 5,000 (and my gut tells me that is high). so that is revenue of $495,000/year. Minus taxes, payment processing fees, etc. Subtract the cost of support. creating and testing the firmware, all the things needed to ensure it can’t be passed off as the locked down firmware, etc.
You will probably still be left with a few hundred thousand dollars in profit. That sounds like a lot, but having worked for similar companies, I can tell you it is likely to be seen as “pocket change” and just not worth it..
I actually think $99/year is waaaaay over what the market will bear given that I can find many listings on ebay for under $100
Or they could buy a Ti-Nspire CX2 which will support Python, which is something the students will probably run across in the real world. Especially in science.
https://education.ti.com/en/products/calculators/graphing-calculators/ti-nspire-cx-ii-cx-ii-cas
Also, this doesn’t say anything about disabling TI-BASIC support. This is just about a very niche community.
Given the amount of FOSS and cheap ARM boards out there, I don’t see the point in crying over this.
> I don’t see the point in crying over this.
True – but it sort of speaks to a corporate “all you devices belong to us – even after you *bought* them” mentality. ( to go along with a Liberal/Progressive “we know better than you” mindset.)
Jimw338,
+1 for your main point
-1 for wrongly attributing it to liberal/progressives since in actuality there’s just as much “we know better than you” attitude on the other side. Hell, “I know better than you” might as well be trump’s campaign slogan.
TI-84+, a poor man’s HP 50g
Probably because today “normal” kids don’t use this so called feature anymore.
> Probably because today “normal” kids don’t use this so called feature anymore.
Then why remove it?
I never used it to cheat, but I did write programs that the teachers let me use.
I had a physics teacher specifically say, ‘If you’re smart enough to write the program to do these calculations, then you’ll no doubt be able to do them with the tool. The trick is knowing which ones to use for the problem you have in front of you, and the program won’t answer that.’ She was right. It was about using the tool to speed up the process of solving the problem.
Just remember — TI allowed side-loading only after some folks figured out how to do it without their blessing on older calcs. They didn’t embrace it right away. The pendulum will swing again.
bryanv,
I agree, and I think this is how we should be encouraging students and teachers to approach it.
It doesn’t surprise me that TI wants to build it’s own walled garden restrictions. I’m not so confident it will go away. Every couple of years we see more owner freedoms being chipped away and manufacturers holding the keys. It’s gradual and may be under the radar if you aren’t paying attention, but we may be reaching the end of an era for technology existing under owner control. Walled gardens could become a permanent feature for mainstream computing platforms.
There’s another reason why these features are being removed from devices like this and no one here is addressing it.
The people installing these hacks nowdays are basically stupid and don’t know what they are doing. They can’t follow instructions, and won’t read the documention that comes with these mods and projects.
They install the wrong firmware for the devices. and basically brick them and then try returning them for refunds claiming they are “defective”, when the only thing defective about them was the person using it.
So of course TI got fed up with this crap, and decided to finally fix the problem at the source.
So congratulation to all of those who’s been running around for years moaning that people shouldn’t have to read the instructions/documentation for the software,hardware and OS’s they are using.
This is the end result of your stupidity.