I remember the day in high school when I realized I knew what all the buttons on my TI-83+ did, even if I rarely used them. It was a very “I know too freakin’ much” sort of moment.
You didn’t say what math level you are in, but rest assured, keep at it and eventually you’ll know what they all mean, too. I’m surprised that your teacher doesn’t! :eek:
Two calculator stories:
My father still owns and uses a very old calculator which must have been one of the first ‘scientific’ models. It has always beaten any other calculator buttons down in two vital matters of grooviness:-
i) The display is a bright green, ‘alarm clock’ green and thus doubles as a handy torch when you enter ‘8888888888’.
ii) It has different coloured buttons, including a blue one labelled ‘DR’ which seems to have some weird function that no-one understands. If anyone knows what it might do, then I’m in two minds as to whether I want to know – part of me wants it to be a ‘connect to the alien mothership’ button or something. By the way, it doesn’t stand for ‘derivative’.
I still own a Casio clone made by Tandy, which just scrapes into the CWARAOB class, although it doesn’t have any graphical functions. I was the only person in my class at (high) school who managed to get away with using a programmable calculator (which were banned – this was the late eighties) because it looked so slim and didn’t have a big ‘PROGRAMMABLE’ label all over it. I’m still amazed that no-one dobbed me in for being able to calculate the roots of a quadratic equation, do permutations and combinations or convert 6B49A3 into binary so quickly. It always seemed to me to balance the best qualities of size, number of functions and ease of use. Happy days…
I have a TI-83. I love that thing. You know, I’ve managed to pass tests knowing practically nothing about what I’m talking about but being skilled at plugging stuff into the calculator.
Mmm…I love my TI-89. “You need two things to solve all the problems in life: friends and a TI-89.” That thing’s so powerful. It does almost any integral I can throw at it which was especially useful on the AP Calc test since it saved me about 5 minutes total of number crunching. Plus, the games are so fun. Anyone play Phoenix?
What’s the make and model number on it?
Darn you Uncle Beer, I lusted after one of those, I can’t believe it was twenty years ago, you just made me feel soooooo old. I wonder how SHARP lost there edge in scientific calculators? At the time they were almost without competition when they started using dot matrix displays.
Glad someone mentioned the CASIO FX7500, what a great design the flip case was, a full graphic calculator the size of a credit card (but half an inch thick) when closed.
I’ve still got my crusty old Casio fx-100D, been through 4 battery changes and the hamsters need swapping now and again, but it’s still going strong.
I’ve use every damn function on that thing at some stage during high school and university - including linear regression,complex algebra, and those hyperbolic sin/cos thingies.
Thanks QED and Achernar. You have freed me to procrastinate until well after the math lab closes! I should have thought of looking for the manual online myself. :smack:
Because slide rules are getting harder to come by nowadays.
Some of you whipper-snappers probably don’t even know what a slide-rule is, do you. I can make coffee with one! (you pull out the thingy in the middle and it makes a great coffee stirrer)
I must say, however, that I prefer my TI-85 - even to play around with little stuff like y=X[sup]2[/sup]+2X-5 …
'the heck you need an ‘equals’ button for?
That’s why God created RPN
Pffft! Not only do I know what one is, I once owned 3 of them and knew how to use them.
Mmmm…TI-83+.
<calculator lust>
strokes calculator lovingly
C’mon, baby. You and I can get through this. You got all those formulas in your memory, we’re gonna get through that math test tomorrow no problem, right? Sequences, series, sigma notation…We got it under control.
</calculator lust>
Ahem. Yeah. Anyone else got the TCPA PuzzPack on their '83? My high score in Tetris Attack (not tetris, mind you, very different games) is currenly 3200.
I’ve never played a Pac-Man game as hard as the one that I’ve got on my HP48G+ We worshipped the guy who managed to get all the way to the…get this…3rd level!!
Q.E.D: Short answer about the ‘DR’-buttoned calculator - I don’t know. Dad’s an international phone call away and belongs to the “This call’s costing me a fortune!” club, so getting an answer to this question might take a while (we talk about once a month).
But since my post above, I’ve decided quite firmly that I don’t want to know what it does. Finding out that it merely stands for “Diggly’s Reciprocal function” or whatever would just reduce its wierd grooviness, so please don’t go googling ‘obscure calculator functions’ on my account! 
Is anyone else actually that people are allowed to use calculators that can do symbolic things on math tests?
I’m genuinely curious, here, but back when I was actually taking math classes and we were deeply impressed by the TI-80, the teacher wouldn’t let us use the bloody things because he felt, probably rightly, that they’d be too much of a crutch. And if those could integrate at all, it was only numerically.
Surely having your calculator solve things like the integral of sin[sup]2/sup for you more or less fails entirely to test your ability to integrate… Not that tests are the be-all and end-all of education, and not that integration is the most important thing in the world, but I wonder if having calculators able to do that sort of thing actually impedes learning math…
-g8rguy, who uses either a pencil and paper or Maple. We don’t need no stinkin’ calculators.
Oh, and as to “DR”… Could it be a conversion from degrees to radians?
I love my TI-81 that I got, what, 11 or 12 years ago back when I was a sophomore in high school. His name is Big Red, despite being the standard (back then, anyway) blue.
AND… I took over my father’s slide rule when I was in high school, too. But only because I had math teachers who claimed I could use it if 1.) I could find one, and 2.) I could figure out how to use it. The slide rule (in its trusty orange leather sleeve) and its 1960s manual (complete with a picture of a kid in a buzz cut and thick-rimmed glasses on the front) are in a box in my cellar.
I was always surprised by how speedy one could get with a slide rule. Now, about that abacus thingy…
Horrors be upon us! Am I the only one who actually enjoys doing equations by hand (note–not the really complex ones 
). And I’m actually a whipper snapper, can you believe it?!
gr8guy: Nope, sorry. It had the standard Deg/Rad/Gra 'modes’anyway, but DR would do pretty freaky stuff that never looked like it had a pattern to it.
‘2 + 8 DR’ might give ‘8’, but ‘5 - 2 DR’ might shoot out ‘4.255557’ or something - it plucked these things out of whatever calculators have in place of thin air, I’m tellin’ ya.
Oh, and just because I’m now at home, the Tandy model is the EC-4020. I’m sure that’ll have relevance to few if any Dopers, but I include it for the sake of completeness.
I still use one, almost every day.
It’s pretty hard to use when you are getting your butt kicked in a Cessna 172 on a summer day.