Obscure / Rare Technology you used.

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Hoss

Hoss

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I remember I had a sharp while everyone else had TIs. The teachers told me the sharp would do the job but I was on my own figuring out how because they had no clue. The great thing about the sharp was that I could write BASIC programs with it. To this day, I have no idea what the intended purpose was for that, but I used it to write myself cheat sheets.
 
Cad

Cad

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BrutulTM said:
I guess I missed out on the calculator team hehe. It was all about TI-81s in high school and then we got into the HPs in college which was a whole new world.
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Check out some of the calculator tests. They're absolutely insane like 20-deep nested parens, roots, etc.. nothing hard about it but you have to handle the order of operations correctly which makes RPN the tits.
 
BrutulTM

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Hoss said:
I remember I had a sharp while everyone else had TIs. The teachers told me the sharp would do the job but I was on my own figuring out how because they had no clue. The great thing about the sharp was that I could write BASIC programs with it. To this day, I have no idea what the intended purpose was for that, but I used it to write myself cheat sheets.
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You could write in BASIC on the TI's too. I had a little blackjack program but I was too lazy to figure out how to handle the aces so it just gave you a random number between 1 and 10 for your cards.

Programming test answers into the calculators was big in college. I assumed the professors expected us to do it because I think everyone did. There was one kid that would try to get all of his notes for the semester into his calculator for the final. I always thought if he spent as much time actually studying as he did typing shit into his calculator he probably would have aced every test anyway.
 
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Hoss

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BrutulTM said:
You could write in BASIC on the TI's too. I had a little blackjack program but I was too lazy to figure out how to handle the aces so it just gave you a random number between 1 and 10 for your cards.

Programming test answers into the calculators was big in college. I assumed the professors expected us to do it because I think everyone did.
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Which TI? If it was possible with the 81s nobody knew about it or how to do it. In college most people had 85s and, again, as far as I know no one knew how to do it with them either. Even the math profs who were supposed to be experts with the calculators didn't seem to know.
 
Jackie Treehorn

Jackie Treehorn

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Lanx said:
in my college years (late 90s/2000s) cell phones were still being charged by the minute. i honestly don't know how we functioned w/ 200minutes a month free nights and weekends.

i'd have a cellphone for myself and my gf/wife and a beeper too, i got tired of having a phone around after college and decided not to have one for a few years, i missed out on blackberry, and i think i went to the shitty droid as my first come back phone
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Hell yeah, free nights and weekends.

I was one of few kids I knew on highschool in 1997 to have a cellphone, then by 1999 or so everyone had one. I remember everyone waiting til after 5 to call, good times.

I had a friend whose dad had a cellphone in 1992ish and I want to say it was $3-4 a minute.
 
Palum

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Jackie Treehorn said:
Hell yeah, free nights and weekends.

I was one of few kids I knew on highschool in 1997 to have a cellphone, then by 1999 or so everyone had one. I remember everyone waiting til after 5 to call, good times.

I had a friend whose dad had a cellphone in 1992ish and I want to say it was $3-4 a minute.
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Yea we had a DynaTAC and MicroTACs at home, but the first one I got was a StarTAC. I miss that little guy.
 
Void

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This was the calculator I used in college. Still works if I change the battery. Made storing cheat sheets super easy.
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rhinohelix

rhinohelix

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Void said:
This was the calculator I used in college. Still works if I change the battery. Made storing cheat sheets super easy.
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This MF'er was the BOMB; I basically aced 2 stat classes because no one understood that I was writing programs rather than doing my homework. It may have been the highest grades I made in college. I do not for a moment to this day feel guilty about it.
 
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Kobayashi

Kobayashi

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Siliconemelons said:
I was going to add this, I used this after my brother, my bro used this for HS and college then I got it and had no idea how to use it … ti83 for me!
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My old boss/mentor would always carry his around at work. He never stopped trying to explain to me how great that ass backwards entry system was. I'm sure if you locked me in a room with one of those fucking things for a month it might finally click, but I was perfectly happy with my TI calculators I grew up with.

When he finally got a smartphone, he got an emulator app for the damn thing. I'm pretty sure it's the only app he uses to this day other than email and a web browser. I've got one for the TI89, it's pretty fucking sweet.

In college, I bombed the placement test since it was no calculator. I realized that I never actually learned big chunks of math in high school since I spent all my time programming my calculator to do it for me. For a few things I even had it set up to show work/intermediate steps.
 
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BrutulTM

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Kobayashi said:
In college, I bombed the placement test since it was no calculator. I realized that I never actually learned big chunks of math in high school since I spent all my time programming my calculator to do it for me. For a few things I even had it set up to show work/intermediate steps.
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I'm sure I had similar things. Sort of shows the fucked up incentives in education. Thinking about everyone cheating on college tests we were all there paying to be educated and then finding ways to not learn what we were there to learn because we just wanted the diploma and grades.

Kids are stupid.
 
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Hoss

Hoss

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BrutulTM said:
I'm sure I had similar things. Sort of shows the fucked up incentives in education. Thinking about everyone cheating on college tests we were all there paying to be educated and then finding ways to not learn what we were there to learn because we just wanted the diploma and grades.

Kids are stupid.
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whatever. You never use 90% of the shit they try to teach you anyway. How are we supposed to know which 10% is important?
 
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