I recently decided I should send my aging TI-83 graphing calculator out to pasture. I haven’t really used the thing since my freshman year of college, and if I am going to do any serious amount of math, I have much better looking (and faster) solutions on my iPhone and even my ancient Zire 31. I’m a little surprised Texas Instruments hasn’t brought out anything significantly better — a TI-83 feels out of place in 2010. I guess that’s what you get for stifling competition; they’ve basically owned the graphing calculator market for quite some time. (Seems a little like Windows XP to me.)
Before selling it on Amazon, I thought it would be best to save some of the TI-83 Basic programs I had written back at the turn of the millenium. Some of my first programming experience came from writing dinky programs on the thing (which wasn’t ever that easy — keep in mind that it has a severely limiting 16 x 7 display). After figuring out what I was doing (a little) I even wrote a hangman program (pictured above). It’s littered with ugly things like single letter variables and goto statements. I don’t even know if it’s possible to make functions… I think they have to be other programs, a la Matlab — which is part of the reason that I say “Matlab is a great graphing calculator”.
At any rate, I typed up what I thought would be worth saving for “historical purposes” and even uploaded it to my snippets repository on GitHub. Take it as my gift to the TI-83 hacker community. :P
Update: …and within less than an hour, it sold on Amazon. The Internet still blows my mind sometimes.
I used to be into an operating system called BeOS. There was a band made up of employees of Be Inc. called The Cotton Squares (archived) who had their songs posted in MP3 format on their website, but I can only seem to get two of them: 5038 and Virtual Void. Oddly, only a few people on BeShare seem to have any.
The horrible thing is, I think I deleted them a few years ago. That’s the thing about computers, you can be a pack rat with out cluttering up your house. I guess I went on a spring cleaning rampage.
Update (2010/06/06): I’ve found copies of the MP3s I mentioned since writing the original post. I think it’s pretty safe to say they’re some of the last copies available. Since I know I’m not the only person who would go looking for these, I thought I should post them here. The BeOS has gone away, the band’s site is down, I can’t figure out how to contact their label, their fan club is no more, and I can’t even find anything on Amazon.
I think I found Baron Arnold (a member of the band) Facebook and Twitter, so I’m trying to ask him first.
Update (2010/06/22): My efforts to contact the band, its members, and their label has hit a standstill. All seem to have disappeared a number of years ago (but if that’s not the case, please let me know!) and I can’t find any commercial copies of these anywhere. I know several people have come by my site looking for more info about the Cotton Squares, so I thought I’d post the MP3s. Here they are:
This is strictly a posting as a fan. If you’re the copyright holder and would like them removed, please contact me.
Update (2010/09/19):Joe Prostko contacted me with a download of the above songs, plus some remixes. Turns out I’m not the only one re-hosting this stuff. :) Thanks, Joe!
