#ti-92

The TI-92, a powerful graphing calculator, was released in 1995 by Texas Instruments for $200. It featured powerful new functions for advanced mathematic problem solving, and the ability to graph things out in 3D. It... oh wait, the elephant in the room needs to be addressed.

You probably noticed the keyboard on it. Yes, it has a full QWERTY keyboard. This made college boards and many American testing facilities recoil in horror, because once you slap a QWERTY keyboard on A Thing, it becomes... a computer.

So, this thing isn’t a graphing calculator anymore. It’s a computer. It has a Motorola 68000 CPU clocked at 10MHz, 128KB of RAM, and 1MB of non-upgradeable ROM. It has a big 240x128 dot-matrix LCD screen. In 1996 they released the TI-92 II which had 256KB RAM, then in 1998 they released the TI-92+ which had a 12MHz CPU clock and 2MB of Flash ROM, along with a price drop to $179.99.

Yet it was still banned because of that keyboard. Angry and pissed off, Texas Instrument’s engineers went back to the drawing board, and decided to shove and cram the TI-92 into the same form factor and layout as their older graphing calculators.

That resulted in the TI-89, released in 1998 for $159.99. It has roughly the same specs as the TI-92+, except it has a smaller 160x100 screen. But the most important change, and the one that the college board approved of, was the removal of the QWERTY keyboard. Yes, you can still type on it, but it is different, therefore it is not a computer but a calculator.

Texas Instruments tried again with a QWERTY keyboard in 2002, with the Voyager 200, which was the TI-92+ in a different shell and double the Flash ROM. Again, it was banned, but the computationally-equivalent TI-89 Titanium was given a pass for looking more like a calculator. That was the last time they tried to use a QWERTY keyboard on a calculator; the current TI-Nspire series uses an alphabetic layout instead.