I remember playing an old Final Fantasy clone all the way through on my calculator. Admittedly, I learned more about installing crap on an obscure device using a weak cable that year than I ever did about tangents and derivatives. I think I charged, but I can't remember how much. So I did the same for my classmates that year. I was one of those kids: During the Clinton administration and in the days before USB cables made everything easy, I purchased a flimsy wire that was hand-made by an enthusiast and sent to me via mail, allowing me to plug my TI-82 into my computer's serial port and install programs and games. (One such site, TI Calc, has been around for roughly two decades.)Īnd those kids familiar with hooking up devices to a computer and installing games were suddenly the coolest kids in the classroom. Website repositories of said games launched and found lasting popularity. The quality of the games got better as the programming techniques got more savvy. Variations on Super Mario Bros, Pac Man, and Pokémon quickly arrived. Naturally, the first programs they built were games, because of course they did.

To this day, the company's TI-84 remains its most popular and widely used, with the TI-83 not far behind.Įventually, the kids got savvy and started learning to program the devices. Part of this was actually allowed by Texas Instruments, which around 1990 started making graphing calculators that could be programmed in various ways-generally through a variation of BASIC, but also through low-level assembly code, which had a clear advantage for the slow calculator. (Wikimedia Commons) As powerful as Game Boys, and mostly used for the same reasonįor roughly two decades, high schools have been giving graphing calculators to students, requiring them for key math classes, and for pretty much that entire time, students have been figuring out ways to use the devices to bend the rules.

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