TI-58 Programmable Calculator
My first programmable calculator was the TI-58. It had neither constant memory (like the TI-58C) nor a card reader (like the TI-59), and so user programs had to be reentered each the time the device was turned off and on. The following description of the TI-59 is from the site :
"The TI-59 was the first "real" programmable calculator in the world - you could actually use it to perform some useful work, like solving the system of linear equation, finding the zero of a function or even playing a Hi-Lo game... or the game of chess. Fantastic 960 program steps (nearly 1 kilobyte of RAM), 100 data registers, a variety of built-in functions... it was a dream machine, a personal computer you could afford during the late 1970s. The TI-59 even had peripherals - magnetic cards to save programs, a variety of solid-state ROM modules containing up to 5000 program steps of (mostly engineering) software and a PC100C printer.
In the old days, amateur programming was "the way to do things", so hundreds of TI-59 owners spent countless hours uncovering TI-59 secrets and writing miraculously optimized programs - saving a single program step (one byte) sometimes took an hour of work. TI-59 programs were distributed via numerous user clubs, and there was a number of TI-59 related publications.
Although hardly anybody actually uses the TI-59 nowadays, accomplishments of TI-59 programmers deserve to be remembered. is dedicated to the good old days when people thought that each byte of program memory was important and when computers were truly personal."
