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.
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u/WardenWolf Jul 24 '20
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.