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The magic of the TI calculators is that the hardware is simple in a way no other widely used platform is. Way simpler than something like a Raspberry Pi. No GPU
by modeless 5y ago
The magic of the TI calculators is that the hardware is simple in a way no other widely used platform is. Way simpler than something like a Raspberry Pi. No GPU, no BIOS, no PCI, no USB, no kernel. You can directly flip pixels on the screen by just flipping bits in memory at a known address and you can see what keyboard buttons are pressed by reading from another address.
And yet despite the utter simplicity, these things are sold and used by the millions even today, so software written for them has a market. I think every CS student should have a chance to program a simple yet real system like that.
- divbzero 5y agoI wish someone had explained the mapping of memory to input/output to me in high school. Had I known it was so straightforward I would have ventured beyond programming BASIC on the calculators.
- thrtythreeforty 5y agoAgree, the system is uniquely approachable for low level. The simplicity is beginning to be a problem for Texas Instruments who faces competitive pressure from other companies who have a more modular codebase and can just drop in Python support. TI is heavily invested in their z80 assembly codebase and can't get things like CircuitPython to build on ez80, leading to hacks like shipping a totally separate ARM microcontroller to run the Python environment, with the z80 playing dumb terminal. A smarter solution would be to virtualize the z80 portions on basically any other architecture and slowly start moving to C wrappers for TI-OS functionality.
- userbinator 5y agoThey do have a ROM, but it's basically equivalent to famous 80s home computers like the C64 and ZX. Also early games consoles like the NES (which truly doesn't have any ROM---it's all in the cartridge).