Despite being a terrible price/per unit technology, I loved my TI calculators, but I was always sort of out of sync with everybody else trying to chase more symbolic math power. Everybody using a TI-82? I'll get a TI-85. School system migrates to the TI-85? I'll get a TI-86! University wanted a TI-89, I'll get the Amiga in a box TI-92+.
The downside? The teachers were only trained on a specific model, so I was always on my own. Good side? I was on my own to do whatever I wanted with these things. I turned my TI-86 into an animation flipbook and rogue-light dungeon explorer using TI-basic and the drawing tools on the calc. I loaded my TI-92+ down with games and even tried to write a shmup for it while learning C using an absolutely terrible early dev environment I pulled off of ticalc.org.
The ecosystem of hackers, apps, and gamers for these things is wild and very extensive. After university I looked on with envy as later TI calcs added more features and capabilities.
I still run a TI-89 emulator on my phone as the default calculator. It's so much more powerful than the crap calculator apps that come with the phones.
I had a similar pattern though for slightly different reasons.
My parents got me TI-83 for my calculus class in high school, which is what everyone had and I was in sync. I managed to drop my calculator down a sewer grating somehow, and I was too embarrassed to ask my parents to buy me a new one, and I couldn't afford another TI graphing calculator, so I ended up getting a substantially cheaper Casio FX-9750G at a thrift store, which actually turned out to be a reasonably good calculator for the price, and got me through Calculus I without too much trouble.
In calculus II I wanted the symbolic stuff, so I managed to find a used HP 50g, and I immediately fell in love with it (and RPN in particular), and ended up using it for everything. I got spreadsheet software installed on there, I played with 3d graphing, I got a clone of Zelda working, it was super awesome. It was almost more like a PDA than a calculator to me.
Similarly, I run an the iHP48 emulator on my phone as my default calculator now.
In retrospect they're probably more of a "Mac Classic handheld", but to my young eyes, deep in the demoscene, it seemed like a portable Amiga in the way that a HP or Sharp palmtop was a full PC.
The TI-89/92 series of calculators feature a Motorola 68000 CPU, and for reasons only younger me can remember, the design of the device felt more Amiga than Mac. The built in d-pad, different kinds of memory, and the integration of the system, it all screamed "GAMES" to me. The "exclusive" club of owners and passionate community of software authors for it also made me identify it more as an Amiga than a Mac.
Some of the stuff people have made for it is mindblowing:
The downside? The teachers were only trained on a specific model, so I was always on my own. Good side? I was on my own to do whatever I wanted with these things. I turned my TI-86 into an animation flipbook and rogue-light dungeon explorer using TI-basic and the drawing tools on the calc. I loaded my TI-92+ down with games and even tried to write a shmup for it while learning C using an absolutely terrible early dev environment I pulled off of ticalc.org.
The ecosystem of hackers, apps, and gamers for these things is wild and very extensive. After university I looked on with envy as later TI calcs added more features and capabilities.
I still run a TI-89 emulator on my phone as the default calculator. It's so much more powerful than the crap calculator apps that come with the phones.