Last year I bought I used TI for my daughter who needed it for school. I got her the oldest version, the one which takes AAA batteries and communicates with the outside world through a serial link. A project like this brings to mind the possibility of stuffing a Raspberry Pi Zero in the battery compartment, hooking it up to the school WiFi, using a terminal app on the calculator to communicate with the Pi and in that way voiding the whole reason of using these ancient beasts in the first place. I won't do this of course - she's there to learn other things besides refining the art of cheating [1] - but it would be a tempting hack. An even more elaborate hack would be to replace the guts of the thing with a Zero running a TI emulator as well as some more useful stuff like ssh. The possibilities are endless... so endless in fact that I'm fairly certain this has been done already, somewhere.<p>[1] which in my days at school consisted of writing the translated works of Homer on a 10x10cm piece of paper, a good way to a) learn to write incredibly small and b) get those words to stick inside your head long enough so you don't actually need to consult the cheat "sheet" during the test.
The author seems to have their own AS for "experimentation purposes" <a href="https://tbspace.de/as203478tbspacenetworks.html" rel="nofollow">https://tbspace.de/as203478tbspacenetworks.html</a><p><a href="https://bgp.he.net/AS203478" rel="nofollow">https://bgp.he.net/AS203478</a><p><a href="https://www.peeringdb.com/net/10981" rel="nofollow">https://www.peeringdb.com/net/10981</a><p>I've always been interested in doing something like this, although it's prohibitively expensive for me, even for IPv6-only.
Notice: this is written in fairly nicely-written C, not ASM with demoscene level micro-optimizations, like you might expect.<p>Goes to show how much you can get out of hardware just by writing code sensibly in a native language (and native libs/tools, of course).
Well Casios are better than TI calculators.<p>My current favorite calculator is Casio ES-115 PLUS2<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-115ESPLS2-Advanced-Scientific-Calculator/dp/B086Z79HXS/ref=asc_df_B086Z79HXS/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=459562603100&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=10200270384879542086&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9002000&hvtargid=pla-914898201055&psc=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-115ESPLS2-Advanced-Scientifi...</a><p>I like it because when you enter sin(pi/12) you get (sqrt(3)-1)/(2*sqrt(2)) in mathematical notation, which is really nice for a $16 calculator.<p>Here I'm going to hurt TI: If you need a TI-84 or TI-89 for school, the place to get them cheap is shopgoodwill.com:<p><a href="https://www.shopgoodwill.com/Listings?st=ti-84%20plus&sg=&c=&s=&lp=0&hp=999999&sbn=false&spo=false&snpo=false&socs=false&sd=false&sca=false&caed=7/12/2021&cadb=7&scs=false&sis=false&col=0&p=1&ps=40&desc=false&ss=0&UseBuyerPrefs=true" rel="nofollow">https://www.shopgoodwill.com/Listings?st=ti-84%20plus&sg=&c=...</a>
They also built a serial adapter that connects to a dial-up modem:
<a href="https://youtu.be/epFX8K0dhdY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/epFX8K0dhdY</a><p>And an IRC client:
<a href="https://youtu.be/afkrucsMMrc" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/afkrucsMMrc</a>
The author's blog has a lot of interesting projects, though I did not find a writeup on this one.
<a href="https://tbspace.de/" rel="nofollow">https://tbspace.de/</a>
Now I want to see a website hosted by my favorite graphing calculator, the one that comes with the best UX for operating on numbers - RPN (Reverse Polish Notation). HP-48G
Why did I click on this expecting a calculator out of all the possible servers would withstand HN's hug of death? Smart of the commenters here archiving it before it inevitably went down
That makes me think that a solar interntet is possible, perhaps routers and less intensive webpages may start moving if there was a value proposition for their owners. Sure it's not a whole solution just yet, but it's a start.
I'm not really proud of this but my 1st step into programming was writing programs to calculate things for me on the TI in high school.<p>At some point teachers made us delete programs in front of them before major tests.....someone else wrote a program that would simulate deleting programs and showed an empty screen which meant all programs were deleted.<p>I wasn't a dumb kid but I always felt like why just not program those things and have more free time? I guess I was always a dev.
This is really cool, but these days I prefer to host on virtualized Casios so I can scale up if I need Casio FX perf or down if I need Casio Databank perf.
Assuming Casios can run links or some custom browser - does anyone want to grab a snapshot of this page being rendered on their calculator to complete the circle?
Its a great mystery to me why American students have to buy expensive programmable calculators for course work. I vaguely remember reading that it is the result of lobbying by calculator manufacturers.<p>In my country even undergraduate science/engineering students dont need a programmable calculator. Some undergraduate programs like CS don't need any type of calculator.
Interesting. I still have a Jornada 680, which uses the Hitachi SH3 CPU (compared to this Casio's SH4). It came with Windows CE, but there was a Linux distro for it called Jlime. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jlime" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jlime</a>
I subscribed it to an uptime monitor - <a href="https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/fxip.as203478.net.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/fxip.as203478.net.html</a>
Shame, because I only have an fx-970G Plus which can't run custom code besides BASIC. Otherwise I'd join you in this calculator-net! Awesome project, though
When I got my TI-89 long time ago, I remember that the TI programming scene was very vibrant back then. Many game ports and all of sorts of interesting software.
I can imagine if the site own who is stuck in Mars with a Casio fx-9750GII will attempt to use it to host a web page to communicate back to earth or something.
I have a soft spot in my heart for underpowered computers, but practically, I know this is kind of an unnatural fetish, and not really a healthy love. The little computer costs way more and consumes way more per watt than modern systems, and any minimal use case is better done via virtualization in a container on a more capable computer. Yet, the fetishism of all manner of obsolete, underpowered and wildly obsolete chip process technology remains!
based on the hostname, although the httpd isn't answering, it makes me wonder if they also made the calculator speak BGP and take a full ipv4/ipv6 BGP table. Somehow with the RAM requirements I doubt it.
8 years ago I worked for an LED lights company which had a bright idea to put whole ucLinux + webserver to be ran on a microcontroller on an LED light to put a claim on just how smart they are, and that now they are "an Internet company" like as if the dotcom bubble hasn't happened.<p>So it was a $1 LED light board + $32 some old, and exotic MCU setup with own external memory, power supply, etc (even by 2013, ucLinux was already "very dead" without any new MCU support for 8-7 years.)<p>Aside from most extreme size limitations for the HTML UI, I was genuinely surprised just how snappy it was.