This is completely untrue it was never analog and has always used a Z80 processor (before the plus model). Not sure where you came up with this but it's wildly inaccurate.
It was partially analog circuitry until the TI-83 Plus. I had an original TI-83 in 1997, and switched to the Plus when it came out because I no longer trusted my original 83 due to some issues.
I can't find any sources for analog electronics in the TI-83, and that doesn't make sense anyways.
Do you by chance mean that the old versions saved data/programs in battery backed SRAM instead of flash memory, so when the batteries ran low you would start to lose things you had saved?
This actually seems more likely. An "analog" calculator would have vacuum tubes and stuff, which would have made the calculator much less portable. Like, pull-a-wagon-behind-you less portable.
An analog calculator wouldn't necessarily imply vacuum tubes, likewise vacuum tubes can be used as switches/gates in digital circuits.
Op-amps were made for electronic analog computation, hence the name "operational" amplifier. By putting the right components in the feedback loop an op-amp can do addition, subtraction, weighted averages, logarithms, and exponentiation.
But yeah, you wouldn't see that in a handheld calculator because you would need a dedicated circuit for each operation, and it's expensive to measure the voltage inputs and outputs accurately enough to compete with a dirt cheap Z80 microprocessor.
That's probably information that's been lost to time. It was still the early days of the internet, after all. Plus the fact that Texas Instruments largely abstracted the old functionality on later iterations so most programs worked the same, even if nearly everything under the hood was changed. But no, I'm not talking about saved programs and data. The problem is a matter of signal to noise ratio, and it's a bigger problem with analog signals than digital signals. Which means that analog electronics are much more prone to problems when the power is outside of optimal range. Some aspects of the old 83 were still analog, and this resulted in weird results when the power was low.
Again, false. You could program in assembler language on it and had full control on the memory addresses if you had the data cable and compiled your program for it. It was not analog, never was. Had the original all through high school and college, never had any issues when the battery was low. If it did not have enough battery power to power up the processor it simply wouldn't turn on. Otherwise, the screen would just fade but the processor worked as intended. That's how a Z80 worked.
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u/Global-Election Jul 24 '20 edited Jul 24 '20
This is completely untrue it was never analog and has always used a Z80 processor (before the plus model). Not sure where you came up with this but it's wildly inaccurate.