Mailarchives (A86: (Comments about TI - new platforms.. etc.. and stuff))

well, Nagel got a preview 86 because of his ASM work on the 83, he pretty much brought 83 asm to life, so they gave him an 86. But now because of the abundance of GOOD 86 programmers, they didn't give him an 89. Anyways, regarding MSIE, I like it, but it crashes too much on my system :( I have IE 5.0 developer's edition, but 4.0 crashed often too.

Hmm.. thats not fair! Hehe.. well actually it is kind of nice how TI helps out people. But they do it in the suddle way. They gave ticalc.org a second DNS server, gave HAL IC author offered a new calc for $10 bucks when there old one got stolen, and they gave Bill Nagel a pre-release version of the 86. I bet Dan Eble got some stuff from TI too, .. umm.. you can tell by the respect he gets from Pat Milheron.

TI is smart. They dont even have to advertise. They simply help out the programmers once and awhile. It is the games that attracts many people

to the expensive graphic calculators, not the mathematics. And TI knows

this. I seen games being played on the graphic calculators quite frequently, in over 3 different schools now that I have been too. The TI-86 is popular, so is the 83 and 85. And our math teacher gives out TI-82 to people who dont have them. She didnt even know the TI-86 existed until

I mentioned it. I feel personally insulted ;-)

Pat Milheron monitors these lists.. some of the good ideas that TI has done came from the web pages. It was Zshell that started it all...

So if TI is watching.. then we need to add this:

Piezoelectric speaker - Yeah! HP has it, why not? Or maybe as an

addon like a speaker that can snap in

Infared port - Sure! Have far transmission, but short reception (but design it so it can easily be changed to recieve signals from far away).. or able

to connect to a USB or something similar.

Timer - Such as a built in clock. Alarms, etc can be made with the piezo and timer combined.

Better LCD - To blurry, need a faster LCD (Cant wait till 89.. hoped it improved)

Grayscale - What the hell... a grayscale interface would be nice. Spherical objects with shaded in.. or blending. 4-bit grayscale would

be superb!

Is this similar to a gameboy? WHO the **** cares? It doesnt have catridges, you dont pay for the games, if its a gaming machine and a

mathematics machine in one, who will be complaining? Certainly not I.

Just dont mention its gaming ability to schools, but to students in a suddle way, like you are now.

Memory is getting cheap, extra memory that grayscale will take up is irrelavent, a $.50 cent timer and $.10 cent infared LED... would rock

Flash epprom.. etc

Call it the TI-98 - Sell it for a flat $150 (Z80 based - 10 mhz cpu)

Or call it TI-100 - Sell it for $200 (68k based)

Anyone have any comments?

Later,

Matt