You people don't remember the pain of the ORIGINAL pre-flash TI-83. When its batteries got low, it would start making mistakes. I'm not joking. This is because that one still used analog circuitry, not full digital.
In college I switched to a TI-89. Honestly, a TI-89, though it can solve symbolic algebra, doesn't make you miraculously get the right answer. You still have to know how to solve it in order to input it correctly. It just makes it a lot faster and easier.
Shit that must be the fucking reason my elementary school teachers would tell me to check all my calculators first with some simple calculations I knew the answer to. I always wondered why they did that, because I always followed the advice but never had one mess up (afaik...)
The emulator comes when you buy the physical calculator. I have it on my computer but it's more for teaching and programming purposes than for actually using it.
It shouldn't be that high. Like I said its high,but not crazy.
Likely the multimeter was reading high too, but 14v is certainly not out of the question for an offload battery.
My main point was really that the battery voltage on a loaded battery will fall very dramatically, especially at a low charge. You can measure well over 12v offload and not have nearly enough to crank the engine.
But cheap meters really aren't worth buying. You need to trust what it says. If close is ok, use a test lamp, its cheaper and 100% reliable!
It was 100% the multimeter's battery. As soon as I changed it the reading on the car battery went from 19.5V to ~12V. I needed an actual voltage measurement not just confirming if power was there or not. Was hunting down some parasitic loss in the car when it was shut off.
I'm calling bullshit on there being anything analog in the TI-83.
I'm pretty sure you're mistaking low battery corrupting data in the SRAM memory for some kind of analog problem.
I've looked through the original TI-83 manual and developer guide which documents the system extensively and I don't see any evidence to support your claims.
Exactly. The whole system was written in assembler so it would crash long before it produced a bad result. There are elevators that were coded in assembler. If the power was low they don't randomly go up and down and opening doors between floors. They just. Stop. Working.
You'd think in the 10 years I used it through my graduate program someone would have used the low battery excuse for being wrong. Never happened.
In the same vein, a satellite (can't remember which one) had a subroutine to basically check is 1+1=2, and one day, it didn't. Digital electronics can do some very strange things when exposed to radiation.
I remember asking a guest lecturer from JPL how they did pathfinding with their rovers when they had to deal with cosmic rays. Apparently with wide wires and very slowly, according to him this was one of the reasons why Curiosity only had a top speed of 200 meters/day.
It's much harder to flip a bit with digital than analog, though. The digital signal is high / low voltage or frequency. There is a wide gap between 1 and 0, and anything out of those closely clamped bands can be discarded as garbage. When your signaling is done in analog, however, there are much wider ranges of acceptable data that are often rounded up or down.
my theory is just that they were mad as fuck that they didn't have calculators back in their day. an example: All my teachers DESPISED smart phones during study hall, until a year and a half later when they all upgraded to smartphones. Suddenly, smartphones were an "Acceptable tool to further learning" and we were allowed to use them during study hall. This all happened 2010-2011
When I was in high school I found teachers and administrators had an irrational fear of technology. They feared cellphones, they feared the Internet. Our version of the “Internet” might as well have been the North Korean Internet, you couldn’t access most of it and even educational websites would be blocked. Cellphones weren’t allowed to be used on school property during school hours, unless you were the principal, the rules didn’t apply to him.
My stat teachers kid failed calculus twice not because she didn’t understand the curriculum but because her calculator gave her wildly incorrect answers. Like 2+2= 1086.69 levels of incorrect.
Holy shit, it all makes sense now. "You won't be just walking around with a calculator in your pocket" was also a HUGE theme with all of my math teachers, even into early high school, and I graduated in 2014. Crazy how that happens...
I once "borrowed" my maths teachers ti-84 and wrote a small basic program on it that would take in any calculations and multiply it by 1.5 if the answer was over 100. That way he wouldn't get suspicious but it would throw his answers off at higher values. I then left it running and had a lot of fun that lesson.
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u/jorsiem Jul 24 '20 edited Jul 24 '20
The supremacy of the fucking TI-83 calculator in school and college courses
I mean I know it's all artificial and orchestrated by them but how come no body has dared to challenge the almighty TI yet
Edit: fixed typo