Technology moves really fast. Everything is always getting faster. Everything is always getting cheaper. Everybody is constantly having new ideas about everything. And then there's graphing calculators. When it comes to graphing calculators, there was one company 50 years ago that figured out how to get you and me to buy their calculators and made sure no one else could ever get in. From The Verge at Vox Media, this is Verge History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pierce, and on today's show, we're talking about TI graphing calculators.
Support for the show comes from Square. If your business relies on a bunch of disconnected tools to get things done, then it's time to check out Square. You can simplify your operations and bring payments, inventory, staff, scheduling, and online orders into one intuitive system. If you're starting a business or running one that deserves better tools, Square helps you sell, manage, and grow without slowing down. Right now, you can get up to $200 off Square hardware at square.com/go/verhistory. That's square.com/go/verhistory. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today.
All right, it's time to talk calculators. A thing I never thought I would say ever again in my entire life. Joining me in studio, Nilay Patel. Hello. What was your calculator? High school Nilay, what's he using?
So, I'm old. So, I had a TI-82. This is pre-USB port. It's pre the redesign that you see here. That thing was a square brick.
You got the one right before it became really interesting actually, which is sort of fun. We're going to talk about all this. Also here, V Song. Hi, V. What was yours?
I had a TI-83 Plus Silver Edition. I was special.
That's fancy. It was fancy. Okay, I want you, you were describing before we started recording your weird high school calculator situation.
So I went to Stuyvesant for high school, Stuyvesant High School in New York City, which is a math and science school. Because the wealth disparity at Stuy when I went was extremely huge. So you had kids on food stamps and you had kids who were billionaires and like very well connected in New York, whatever. But you know, these calculators are expensive. So, we had a used TI-83 market. And then when the TI-84 came out, I was still in high school. There was a schism between the kids who could afford the new TI-84s despite having the TI-83s, and then just a whole drama. And if you had the Silver Edition like I did, you felt special just because it was translucent.
Does this sound familiar to you, Nilay? The like status symbol of the calculator. This was definitely a thing in my high school and more of a thing in general than I realized. Was this a thing in your world? So again, you're old. Yeah, understood.
We took our TI-82s apart and painted them.
Oh, see, that's fun. So I like that.
The TI-82s are big and square. They weren't, they didn't have this design. They were, they were just square. And so it was four screws, six screws, and you would just lift off the back and you could just paint it.
That's... What color was yours?
Mine was silver with a black stripe. I had, we had, it was lots of, there was lots of stripes. There was lots of spray paint and stripes.
Nice. And then the other thing which was very important was the cover slid off. And so you could do almost anything you wanted into that cover. And what we discovered that you could do with that cover is you could slide a Game Boy Pocket right into it.
And that's the little silver Game Boy when they made them small. It was still black and white, but it fit perfectly in that cover. And the main thing that you had to do was you had to mod the Game Boy so that it didn't ding when it turned on.
Oh. And then you just put it in the thing, hold it up like you're using a calculator.
And then you're just, you're just graphing.
That's pretty great. You're just graphing on that Game Boy. We got caught a lot, I would think.
I like how most of like our memories with the calculator are just all the ways we've modded the calculator to do non-calculator things.
So this turns out to be a theme of this entire story going all the way back and kind of all the way forward to now. So let's, let me, let me go back. And there's a, there's a thing we have to do here, which is I have to, I have to tell you a brief history of the calculator. It's going to be very brief, but the, the main thing I want you to take away from the beginning of this story and frankly this entire episode is calculators are computers. And in, in so many ways before the personal computer industry as we know it now, before kind of the mid-70s, Intel and Apple and all these companies building the personal computer, building Silicon Valley as we know it, right before that was calculators. And calculators were that thing. Like the, the launch of a new calculator was like the launch of the iPhone 4. It was like a big deal. It got headlines. There was a, a chip for calculators that was on the cover of Fortune magazine at one point. This is like, this is a huge culturally important phenomenon. So back to the early 60s.
In the United States, the semiconductor industry is starting to boom. You have this company Texas Instruments, which I think is like, we don't talk about TI all that much in sort of current technology stories. But it turns out to be one of the most kind of historically important companies in tech. I think it was early to transistors. It made transistor radios. It made chips for speech synthesis like decades before that was a thing. TI created the Speak & Spell, is a fun fact I recently discovered. They've been basically way ahead of chips for a really long time. And this big thing that happened in the early 60s was this thing called the integrated circuit. I do not pretend to be a chip expert, but Nilay, correct me if I'm wrong. The integrated circuit is basically like we took a bunch of computing things and shoved them all together onto one chip, which makes it cheaper and easier and smaller. And this is like the beginning of microchips.
Yeah. Right. And then TI is like, again, very fascinating because it's one of those companies where the people who work there went on to start all the other most important companies in the world and all of those little pieces. We invented one thing. We invented the, the integrated circuit. The IC is like a direct line to six other companies that happen because of this core innovation. But that in, you know, in the history of computing there are these core technical innovations that lead to entire eras of computing. And I would say in that, that time period this is, oh, we can make dozens of new kinds of products.
Yes. And they, they sort of understood this, but at the time most of the money for TI and for the semiconductor industry was like big military uses, like they were, they were making these giant computers to put into Air Force bombers. And this was when the, the space race was really booming. And so there was a lot of that stuff happening. But there was, like you said, this sense that, oh, we've done something new and big and remarkable and we have to find places to put it. And they, they decide to get into calculators in a, in a big new way. But first, let me just give you a sense of what calculators looked like in the early 1960s. This is, this is like an important, this is an important thing. So, this right here is one of the most important calculators of the 1960s.
That looks like a typewriter.
Yeah. V, can you just describe what this thing looks like for people who can't see it?
It looks like if you stretched out a typewriter. Basically, it's like a giant box with a, with a bunch of little keys on it. And that really looks like that typewriter thing at the top where, you know, it goes and then you push it back. That looks, that's what that...
Big ass typewriter. Old school cash register is kind of the vibe I get from this too. Yeah.
It's a, it's a giant, giant machine and it's very mechanical. It's very complicated. These things broke a lot. They weighed a million pounds. They were, they were just in, this was what a calculator was for the, for the longest time. Calculators were also very important, right? This was like an increasingly crucial tool in businesses. Everybody wanted a calculator and that's what they all looked like. So TI decides in, in the mid-1960s that actually what they need in order to convince people to do stuff with integrated circuits, they need a, a consumer product that people will use. They had invented the transistors and so they invented the transistor radio to be like, look, here's what you can do with this new technology. And it worked. It was huge. So there's this great story about this guy Jack Kilby, who's an engineer who helped create the integrated circuit, sitting on a plane with the boss of TI. And they're just like brainstorming and they're like, what if we made a handheld calculator? And they just did that. And that was, they just happened to be sitting next to each other on a plane and this is what happens. So this ten-person group of engineers goes off to create a handheld calculator. This is their big idea. We're going to use an integrated circuit to make a handheld calculator. They codenamed it Cal-Tech, which is delightful on two levels. All of TI's code names were academic institutions. So they had like a Project MIT. This was Project Cal-Tech, which also turns out to be really good because it's calculator technology. I'm told this was not intentional, but it like worked on two levels. It's very good.
How do you make that not intentional? How do you say the words Cal-Tech out loud and be like, you know what, it's not, it's not that thing.
No one heard Cal and went, oh yeah, it's a fair point. So they start building this thing and they wind up making a prototype of a calculator. This is in 1967. They called it Cal-Tech. Let me just, let me just show you a picture of it. So right next to the one we just saw, right? Big huge cash register typewriter thing. This is the prototype they make.
That looks familiar. Describe this one.
Very familiar. It's a smaller rectangle with a numpad on it, four functions, and a little like window where you can read the numbers. And oh my god, the logo of Texas Instruments that's seared into my brain right next to the window.
How big is this thing?
It weighed about three pounds. It was, it was, it's still pretty big. Most of the weight was batteries. It, it, you could plug it into the wall to charge it, but also it had batteries. This is like a big new thing that you could theoretically pick up. They called it a pocket calculator. I think that's largely a lie. I think it's, I think it's like seven inches tall. It's a pretty big thing.
That's, that's not a woman's pocket. I'll tell you that much.
Couple of important things to notice about this. It has 10 numbers, right? 0 to 9. The one we saw before had multiple nines and multiple eights and multiple sevens. Like it was very complicated to put these things together. They figured out to do this much more simply. It could only do the four basics: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. And the, the thing you're seeing at the top there that looks sort of like a screen is not in fact a screen. It's a thermal printer.
Oh, is that coming, that tape coming out of the left there?
That's right. Yep. And so one of the things that was happening at the time is there was this early new technology called LCD that was very expensive. So they were like, well, that doesn't work. We, we don't want to put it in here. And the other way to do a display at this time was to, I, I don't completely understand how this works, but it was basically like neon tube lights was essentially where we were.
So that was also too expensive and used too much power. So they were like, okay, our only option, this is one of the last things they figured out was how do we display the numbers, was to have thermal tape so it would actually burn dot matrix numbers in as you went. That was, that was their big idea. So they make this thing. It's just designed to be a prototype. This is, this is the, the Cal-Tech. It could only accept six-digit numbers, which I really like. It was like, it was a very basic thing, but it like completely blew everybody's mind because this is like, this is a handheld calculator. I should say there's, there's an important thing that all of the calculator fans, nerds, whatever you want to call them, will care about. There is this huge fight going on at this time between Japanese companies and American companies. So you have at this moment Japanese product design and design in particular way ahead of the US in, in terms of like ability to design cool functional electronics. Japan is way ahead. The US is way ahead in semiconductors. So what you have over and over is Japanese product companies partnering with American semiconductor manufacturers to make cool things. A bunch of those companies will come up over and over in this story. One of them is Casio, who is a sort of delightful side story in calculators forever and ever, and they will come up many times. But right now the one that they find is this company Canon. Canon, you may know, is primarily a camera company. Fun fact about Canon: Canon got into making calculators because they needed to do such complicated stuff to make their cameras better. They needed like really complicated optical equations and discovered, oh, we sort of accidentally have the ability to make cool calculators. So they got into calculators. So Canon sees the Cal-Tech, says, this is cool, we also want to make one. And they make this. This is called the Pocketronic, which absolutely rules as a name.
It's better looking by a lot.
Yeah. You see what David's saying? The, the, the Japanese companies are like, what if we tried hard? What if we made buttons different colors, right?
So this is a much more like sane calculator design. It also has a giant spool of tape at the top. You can see there. From what I understand, each spool in the Pocketronic was 250 feet of tape, which sounds like a lot of tape. Apparently is not that much.
The idea, like I believe the battery on this thing lasted like three hours and in those three hours of use, you could do thousands of equations on the processor and that would use pretty much all of the tape. So this is like, this is a thing that does a lot of work for you.
But anyway, so this is the Pocketronic. It's a, it's a delightful little device. And that is the first one of these to actually come to market. But even this, when it comes out, is kind of not that exciting because this, this market starts to move really fast. Like I want you to think about the calculator market as the early computer market, right? Where every 15 minutes somebody has a new idea. So already at this point there are other things with better displays. There are newer ideas. There are things that are starting to be smaller. This is called the Sinclair Executive.
Oh my, that looks like a TV remote.
This came out around the same time.
The idea of the Sinclair Executive was that it was, I believe it was 9 millimeters thick and you could put it in your breast pocket.
And that made you a badass. It was just a black rectangle. It looks like a, like prototype TV remote in a way. That makes me really happy.
Or like a really old, like one of those old like bar cell phones circa 2000.
So anyway, so this is coming out around the same time, right? So you can see the ideas happening. There's, there's a version that is technically more advanced, but also ones that are cooler looking, ones that are thinner. Like there's just a lot of stuff happening all at once.
So your, your, your point about this being the early computer industry, I mean, this is very familiar, right? There's a core technology. We're going to have multi-touch screens now. What should phones look like? And there's just an explosion of form factors and styles and some of them have buttons and some of them are really thin.
What should AI hardware look like?
Nonsense, I think, is the general answer right now, but we're going to figure it out.
They had an IC that could do a calculator and everybody had to rush to figure out what a calculator looked like.
Exactly. And it was, it was the idea of the, the integrated circuit and all of a sudden as soon as anybody saw anything about a calculator you could hold in your hand and put in your pocket, instantly understood it in the same way that like a lot of people took a look at a smartphone and went, oh yeah, that I get it. Like there is, there is something to that moment.
So then again, all of this is happening in the course of a couple of years and then we're going to fast forward. I promise this doesn't take forever. This is just a delightful thing to have learned about. In 1972, TI, which had until then been a manufacturer, it was working with lots of companies. It took off really fast because it wasn't trying to be vertically integrated. It was, it was the one who sold these chips to everybody. And so that actually worked really well. Everybody else had these like exclusive manufacturing deals with each other. And TI was just like, we have chips. Do you want them? And so it grew really fast. But then in 1972, TI decides it wants to start selling its own calculator. So this is five years after the Cal-Tech prototype. They've been working on these things. And they make this thing called the Datamath.
V, describe it. What do you think?
Well, if you think of like '80s and '90s computer beige, it's that color. And it sort of looks like a chunkier version of the calculator app on your iPhone. Just in terms of colors, it's got like the beige function buttons, the orange equal button, then like white numbers.
That's true. It doesn't look like the calculator.
This is a very '70s design. This look, this would look totally in context. It would fit totally in with all the aesthetics of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
And like stick it next to an Apple II, and it would suddenly make, it would feel right at home.
So this becomes TI's first calculator. It's a huge hit and immediately, like almost immediately TI just takes off. It becomes the biggest calculator manufacturer in the United States in three years.
It is worth saying that was the prettiest one.
Yes, it was the prettiest one we've seen so far.
And almost immediately TI starts to do two very important things. One, it gets a patent on the idea of a miniature electronic calculator.
Just, they, they literally patented the Cal-Tech. Like that, that first image I showed you is essentially in the patent. Here's what the patent looks like.
That just is the calculator that they made, right? That's the Cal-Tech calculator.
Thickness and the idea, right? You can see how large it is. But the idea of a, there are a bunch of things that are fairly specific about it that make it easy to get around this patent over time. But for a while, the idea of a pretty small calculator kind of belongs to TI as of 1972, which turns out to be fairly important for a while. So TI gets this patent, but it also like pretty quickly starts to do a lot of work to get its calculators out there. They start to work with, with people who are, you know, using calculators in businesses. They start to do a lot of work to train people to use their calculators. TI has this clear idea that we, we need to, we need to do a lot of work to push our version of the calculator into the world. A fun thing that I learned is when they first put the thing out, nobody knew what TI was. So everybody was like, what is this TI calculator? And so their line was, the company that makes your calculator chips now makes your calculator, which is like a rad tagline to have.
Yeah. So this works. It takes off by 1975. It is, it is winning the calculator market. But do you know what else is happening in 1975 is computers. So this is where we take a big turn in the story and this is why I've spent so much time building up to this. Computers start to take over and until this point calculators had mostly been a business tool. This is like a thing you had in your office at every office everywhere. Calculators were huge. And slowly but surely computers start to eat that market. They can do more stuff. They are more powerful. Eventually like spreadsheets start to take over. So this idea of I need to do work things shifts from calculator to computer and even people are starting to bring computers into their homes. Also calculators are really mature at this point. So if you want just a basic calculator it's very cheap, which leaves one place left where there is none of this technology where they think they can go make a lot of money with calculators. Do you want to guess what that place is?
High school. Car dealerships.
Points to Nilay. No, it's schools. I don't know if you guys remember this, but there was this big debate around this time. After Sputnik happened, there was this whole idea of new math and then there was a big backlash to new math and then we went back to the old math and...
We're living this again right now.
We really, we literally are, to say. But there, there had been this big like decades-long debate about what is math, how do we teach it, and for a long time, how much technology belongs in the classroom. Like it is astounding the extent to which we had this, the debate we're having about AI in the classroom right now is the same debate we had about phones in the classroom, is the same debate about laptops in the classroom, is the same debate about calculators in the classroom. It was, it was going to make us stupid. Nobody was, there was literally like a, you're not always going to have a calculator with you. You have to learn how to do the math in your head. Do, do you like...
This is what I'm saying. We did this for forever. And a big, big part of the reason that calculators started to become very accepted into schools is Texas Instruments, which goes around and enlists important teachers and education professionals, the like OG education influencers, to basically extol the virtues of calculators in classrooms. They start to run trainings with teachers to make everybody more comfortable. They like become huge proponents of the idea of you should be able to and maybe even be required to use a calculator because there's also this idea that if you don't use the calculator you're going to be left behind by technology.
Where we just, we just do the same thing over and over again. Like it's, it's wild.
So anyway, we get to the 1980s, calculators take over. There's not that much actual like calculator innovation. Scientific calculators show up. I think Casio does it first and then TI makes one that is by all accounts a literal just, just Chinese factory clone of a Casio calculator, but it wins because TI is the stuff that everybody has in school. And then we get to 1990, which is the beginning of the graphing calculator era, at least for TI. TI is not the first to ship a graphing calculator, but it ships the TI-81 in 1990. It had a 96x64 screen. Pretty exciting stuff.
It had a 2 MHz chip, but it had one very important new thing, which is that you could program it. You could write programs in BASIC, the programming language, and actually run them on the calculator. But there was no way of transferring data on and off. So you had to actually write the programs on the calculator with the calculator, which people did, which I find just utterly insane. But anyway, so at this point these are like becoming everywhere. So 1990 is after this giant decade of innovation in computers and all of a sudden everybody who was doing like really advanced math was doing it on these like big hulking desktop computers. So they show up with graphing calculators and everybody's like, oh my god, I can just do this on a calculator. And so we, we have this sort of swing back to calculators as the easier way to do really complicated math and they, they sort of take off again. I just want to say this is 1990 and you could argue this is the last bit of innovation ever in calculators. It's 1990. Calculators are super mature, super complicated. They can do all the things. This is just basically like the, the line from the TI-81 to this one in front of us, the TI-84 Plus, is very straight and very short. You get the TI-85 in 1992.
The TI-85 was black. It was sick. It was also impossible to use. The numbering scheme of these things also unreal and impossible to...
It wasn't linear. They were different models. It was like, like at that time all the companies loved to differentiate their models with numbers. So like Apple had the Quadra 800 and the Quadra 600 and they, they were, they differentiated the high and the low.
The thing is that sucks and is still better than this. That would be like we have the Quadra 600 and the Quadra 601 and they're completely different products. Like just, it's crazy.
No, it was the TI, I got it because the, there were, there were people in my high school had TI-85s and they were black and obviously I was like, I want that. And I would go and try to use them and they were so different than my TI-82 that literally I had no idea how to use them.
And the TI-82, it's important to know, is a newer and better product than the TI-85.
That's the... makes perfect sense. Yeah, sure.
So anyway, so the TI-85 comes out and its big thing is it gets more power and it has a serial port so you can connect two calculators to each other for the first time or connect one to your computer. And at this point the idea of the calculator programmer just becomes a thing. The, like, calculators are officially computers at this point. There's this old video that shows the way to get into the actual like assembly code of the calculator was you had to do this one very specific modification to a backup file and then put it back on the device and basically jailbreak your thing. TI didn't want people to do this.
But people found a way. This is very like early smartphones again where everybody was figuring out ways to jailbreak their phones and then the Apple...
They just couldn't. Nobody had invented the app store for lockdown in that way.
That's exactly right. So, people find a way to do this. Somebody eventually built an app launcher. You could actually go and like write in assembly code to build stuff that was like close to the metal of the device. And the processor inside of this thing was like old and underpowered. Still is old and underpowered, but it was the thing that like a lot of arcade games would run this processor. So there's like enough that you can make Pac-Man work, which meant there was a lot you could do and people in fact did that thing. TI ships then the TI-82, which breaks that jailbreak. And it takes people years to figure out that jailbreak again. They had figured it out by the time you were, you were into it mercifully. But there was a time when it was really like TI versus the hackers for who can build stuff for the TI calculator. Like these things are just computers. This is a story about computers in a way that I really like. What I want to know, and this is, this is now we immediately get into the like 82, 83, 84 era and I want to talk about those briefly, but I do want to know what did you guys run on your calculators that wasn't your calculator? Like what were the cool games in your school that everybody played?
Minesweeper, Tetris, Snake, Pong, I think someone had Pac-Man. Okay. And then like you could also do like these text choose-your-own-adventure things because you could have text on there and...
I went to school, like I said, I went to Stuyvesant, so computer like programming was a requirement that you had to take. So there would just be kids, they would just do all these crazy things, making like little animations and like graphing things. And I was like, ah, just give me the program and I will play Tetris on my calculator and also write in formulas for math class so that I could pass.
I went and found a bunch of clips of old games running on these calculators and the, the unbelievable nostalgia that it brought back. This is just, it's like dot matrix Tetris basically. And it worked. This was like, this was a fun way to play video games in a, in the most insane...
Well, because you were sitting in the back of algebra class.
Do either of you remember this game? It's called Phoenix. According to everything I read on the internet, Phoenix was like the game for calculators. And it's basically like Space Invaders for calculators.
I don't think I did either. I think I did, but I wasn't very good at it.
How are you missing the most important game of all?
Drug Wars. Yes. Drug Wars. Drug Wars.
Yes. Drug Wars was basically a spreadsheet.
I don't even know how to describe it. Like we tricked a bunch of kids into screwing with a spreadsheet by labeling the rows and columns after drugs.
And so in the game, you're a drug dealer and you're trying to sell drugs, but you have to go places and you, you, you buy it. It's, you have to do drug price arbitrage. It's actually like, it's a surprisingly complicated, actually a really accurate simulation of being a drug dealer.
In that it's a spreadsheet.
In that it's, I don't know if you ever read Freakonomics, but you know drug dealers are just a franchise model ultimately in the end. Anyhow, Drug Wars was the game because you didn't have to break, it was just written in BASIC.
Right, so it was just written in BASIC and you run it and it did the thing the calculator was best at.
Which is adding and subtracting.
And so it was just like incredibly easy to distribute Drug Wars. And so everybody had Drug Wars, but like I don't think our teachers were like, do the drug math.
Did you guys do the like plug your calculator into your friend's calculator and swap stuff?
Yeah. Yeah. There was a very, this was like an OG version.
Did the 82 have a serial port?
The 82 had a serial. 82 had a serial port. And when they had the 83, it went to I think mini USB or maybe. So the 8, I had the 82. And so we could go friend to friend and then the big upgrade was the...
The 83 had USB and then there was like a wave of stuff that happened.
And yeah, this is all for me, this is happening in the context of, I don't know, Steve Jobs returning to Apple, right? Like the iMac is coming out or that first wave, remember the eMac? Like that first wave of Steve Jobs, Jony Ive-designed computers is coming out. And so the 83 was responsive to it. You could get a clear one. The 82 had none of this, right? So I'm on the outside looking in with my like stupid $150 TI-82 and there's no reason to upgrade. Like you, I could not convince my parents that the presence of a USB port in like a clear case was a good reason to buy another better at math.
Yeah. So that's actually, that is an excellent stopping point and segue into what TI does to solve that exact problem. But first, let's take a break.
Support for the show comes from Square, the system that fixes one of the biggest headaches in running a business. Starting a business is exciting. Running it is where things get complicated. You end up juggling payments, inventory, staff, scheduling, online orders, reports, and somehow you're still supposed to serve customers. Square simplifies it all. It does that by bringing payments, point of sale, inventory, staffing, and online sales together in one easy-to-use system. You get sleek hardware and intuitive software, plus a host of AI-powered tools that help automate routine tasks, giving you more time back as a seller. With Square, you can sell online, in-store, or both, and customize your setup as business evolves. If you're starting a business or running one that deserves better tools, Square helps you sell, manage, and grow without slowing down. Right now, you can get up to $200 off Square hardware at square.com/go/verhistory. That's square.com/go/verhistory. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today.
All right, we're back. So at this moment these calculators are everywhere. TI has made a bunch of calculators. A lot of people are using them. I want to get into how it maintains that. But you, right before we went to break, Nilay said a very important thing, which is there was no reason to upgrade. This becomes a real problem for TI and frankly calculator manufacturers ever. Calculators don't break is sort of a thing. That's just true.
They do break if you spray them with the wrong kind of spray paint. Just a fact we learned along the way.
Understandable. But one of the funniest things about the integrated circuit in particular was TI found a way to make it such that it lasted a really long time, which is a good thing and also a bad thing. And so TI essentially has to figure out, okay, how do we get people to keep buying new things? How do we keep inventing reasons for people to upgrade? How do we sort of make it so that our products continue to be entrenched? And what TI decides by and large is not to build a bunch of new products or have a bunch of new ideas. It's to make absolutely sure that everyone has to buy TI calculators. That when whoever is in the market for a calculator will buy a TI product. So at this point, we'll get to like, we're in sort of the turn of the 21st century. The TI-83 has come out. Its big thing is it added flash ROM storage which added a ton of customization. You could run much more complicated apps. So you could do all kinds of new things. It had more power. It had more, you know, more RAM, more ROM, like the whole thing. This was like a much more functional device. Then the TI-84 comes out in 2004. Adds to that just more, more faster, more fun. But the big thing here is TI goes whole hog into working the refs and basically trying to create and maintain a monopoly. Nilay, we've talked a lot about monopolies on the show. Let me just throw a few of these things at you and I just, I want to see how monopoly this feels to you.
So TI starts working with governments and school boards to sign big contracts to buy tons of calculators. One thing that happens a lot is states buying calculators to give to kids who can't afford them. By and large they're going to buy lots of one calculator. TI basically takes over a conference for teachers in order to in large part promote its own products. It starts running free trainings for teachers and for people who want to learn how to teach stuff. It starts making deals with textbook makers to make lesson plans to go along with things that literally include diagrams of TI calculators. It starts working with the College Board to become the official and at various times only certified calculator for important exams.
Oh, that's a good one. That's a really good one.
So TI in so many ways makes itself the official calculator of schools. It has a big lobbying budget that it uses. It's like, I mean this is like straightforward monopoly stuff, right? It's like it makes deal after deal after deal to make it very hard for anyone else to sell a calculator to a school.
So what's really interesting about all this is sure it's monopoly but it's not tying its products together in the way that like the best monopolists do. It's creating an ecosystem of products around what is essentially its interface. So, you know, graphing a standard like linear algebraic equation, like all these calculators can do it.
My mom, she was a doctor and she got bored after my sister went to college and she's like, well, you're going to be fine. And she went back to business school. And she bought a $500 HP business calculator because HP had a monopoly in business. I don't know, man. They were all just calculators. So I had my little TI-82 and my mom had this like crazy HP business calculator.
They could all do the same things.
At the end of the day, it was literally what buttons do you press in what order do you do to graph a sine function? And I could not for the life of me figure out that HP calculator. It was so weird compared to what I was used to. So TI is just standardizing everyone on their interface. You know how to push these buttons in your lesson plan. The algebra textbook is going to say now press what is it, second two or whatever to open the window that lets you change the min/max. Once you're there, there's no hope for you if you have another brand of calculator. And even in my school, the people with the TI-85s had to figure out how to use their own weird calculators because they weren't the TI-82s.
So it was just an incredible standardization on an operating system and an interface that let TI then build all the lesson plans and license to the school boards and all the next things because there is no point in enduring the switching cost away from the standardized interface.
What's interesting to me about this is I also think about, think about a teacher, right, standing at the front of the classroom. It actually makes a lot of sense to make sure that everyone has the same product that you're talking about, right? So one of the things that this brought back was this just like weird visceral memory of the one kid in my algebra 2 class, which I think was 9th grade, who had a Casio graphing calculator and literally could not figure out how to do anything.
Because it was just a different calculator. And the rest of us are sitting there and it's literally like the teacher is describing, like you said, the order of buttons to press in order to do the thing we're trying to do. And poor Jerry is just sitting there in the back being like, what? I don't know how to do any of this.
I brought my Linux computer to class.
Exactly. And it's important to say at this point, TI is, if anything, it is making calculators as good as everybody else. There's lots of indications that in fact many other calculators are much better than what TI is shipping. They're faster. There are a lot of really funny videos.
There's a, so one of the long-running issues that people have with TI calculators is it's really slow to write graphs.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, like if you, if you give it a bunch of data, it's actually very slow to...
I thought that was for learning. Like look at this graph develop.
Idea that is, I think TI would love you.
This graph of heroin prices is actually very revealing.
Look at it work in front of you.
But then they put it next to like a Casio calculator from exactly the same time and it just instantly writes the graph. So these things are slow. They don't do anything particularly unusual, but they work the way that everybody understands in large part because TI made it so. And again, like there are good reasons for everybody to standardize and TI just went way, way, way out of its way to make sure that everybody standardized on TI and holy god did it work.
Yeah. And once you control that standard, you're set.
Yeah. Yeah. It's very hard to get away from because again, calculators haven't really changed in decades. They don't really break. So it's not like there are lots of obvious points to redo your whole school's calculator system. You just keep buying the ones that everybody already has. And that's what everybody keeps doing. I've seen estimates, and this was, let's see, this is maybe 10 years ago now, that at that point a calculator like this, the TI-84 Plus, cost TI somewhere between $15 and $20 to manufacture and they were selling them for about $100. And there was some estimates that said that it was more than 50% profit margin and I've seen other estimates from people who worked at TI that are more like 80 or 90% profit.
So these things are just money printing machines and they are functionally, technologically the same as they have been since like the '90s but they keep on working. Now like if you, I think I wonder if it's still true, if you're in...
High school. Now I want to hear from you. There were, for a very long time, textbooks that would have the pictures of the TI calculators in them, and that was just what they were. And the College Board, everybody starts petitioning them to also allow their calculators, but that's very complicated. The College Board is a very strange place.
If you put a child's SAT score on the line, that's the only reason my parents agreed to get me the silver edition, because I said it would make me better at math and that my SAT scores depended on it. And my dad, like I've been on this show a number of times saying that my dad would not allow any gadget purposes.
Oh, he was all in on the calculator making me bad at math because I was not very good at math in his estimation. Even though...
Probably. Yeah, probably. So, we're basically blowing through 20 years of history here because nothing happens from the TI-84 Plus to today. Nothing happens in calculators.
Like, we've just been standardized on this interface. Why hasn't anyone just made a clone?
So, some people do. Casio makes a graphing calculator that everybody agrees is just as good or maybe better. Sharp is out there making calculators. HP is out there making calculators. None of it matters because TI has won. TI has just defeated everybody.
But like, why can't you just make a clone of the buttons and how the OS works and sell it for cheaper?
I think my theory for that would be that actually the market for it is not big enough anymore. TI has completely cornered this market to the point that it is a reasonable business. But even now today, calculators are in the like other category of TI revenue. Do you know what I mean? So, it's a meaningful business and TI owns it, but it may not be sort of thrilling enough to be worth somebody trying to go really defeat it. In 2014, there was an estimate that TI sold 93% of all graphing calculators in the United States. Like, it just won this market. And my question for you guys is, looking at this thing now, this design that basically hasn't changed in 20 years, is there anything wrong with that? Like, if you take away all of this monopoly behavior and we're back to you just have to compete to make a great product, I kind of feel like it's fine. Like, I have no memory of using a TI calculator being like, 'God, I wish it did X, Y, and Z, or these buttons feel gross.' Like, maybe calculators are just a solved problem.
I just wish it wasn't so big.
It is. It is quite large. It's like, you know, it's like Switch size, kind of a little smaller than a Switch Lite size. It's such a big calculator. And also, you know, it's not all that easy to type equations into this thing. It would be nicer if I could just... I never liked remembering what buttons to have to press, the alpha button, second button. You might like a thing that TI came out with somewhere in the mid-20s called the Inspire, which had a full keyboard. It had a file system. It had documents. It had Wi-Fi. It was literally like a math Blackberry is the only way I can describe it to you.
Yeah, they made a Nokia N95, right? It did not take off in the way that...
Yeah. They were trying to compete with smartphones.
Yes. And I don't think this thing can.
Here's my hot take. The interface of this is very bad.
But the form factor is perfect.
Especially for the thing we've been talking over again, which is a bunch of kids in schools.
I mean, I have an 8-year-old and the debate about whether she will get a Chromebook in her public school is raging in our community to this day. Right. That whole era might have been a mistake. So maybe you do want a large single-purpose-ish device that's just there to do math on, and then when you're done you can either put it away or practice selling drugs, right? Or, you know, get so into it that you go and learn to write a bunch of code and transfer it over a USB connection to a tiny computer that has a limited amount of memory, and now you've learned something else.
Yeah. Again, the buttons and actually like how you navigate this thing, total remnants of an era when user interface design had not yet been invented.
So it's all just a mess. But in terms of the actual form factor of what this is for its purpose, I don't think you can do better. And I actually think there's a kind of focus that comes with this that is really valuable in the context of, okay, we're going to plot a bunch of curves, right? And the point of this is to show you how those things have relationships to each other. And like, do you want that to be more of a computer? Do you want that to be a smartphone with all of the business models that come with a smartphone? Right.
Probably not.
Well, and it's actually useful to think of it next to the smartphone because what everybody has been saying for almost 20 years now is that smartphones will eventually upset the graphing calculator, right? Like it has vastly more power. It can do all the same thing. There's literally a bunch of apps that just fairly straightforwardly emulate a TI graphing calculator. So I found things from like 12 years ago that were like the TI monopoly is crumbling because of apps, and that just didn't happen. And I think that's for the reason you're talking about, that it is actually as much about what the thing can't do and the way that you're supposed to interact with it in this very specific way than it is about the sort of overall set of functions it has. Retrospectively, I really appreciate that I was the era of millennial where we had to have like a flip phone and a TI in school because, you know, sometimes I go on TikTok and I see kids going like, 'Oh yeah, I just took a picture of this equation and the AI solved it for me and now I can learn the steps of it.'
Let me just show you something here. Do you know why the kids like having the TI calculators? Because you can still slide a Game Boy right into that case and don't belong.
One of my absolute favorite things about the research process of this episode was discovering the calculator modding community that still exists and is thriving, and the people out there just like messing with. They made more TI-84s. There's like a TI-84 Plus CE and a bunch of like weird new additions with slightly more power. I cannot describe to you how little has changed about this thing in 22 years. But there are people out there, like I found a thing where somebody had actually put a whole sort of Delta-style slew of game emulators on it. You could just play any sufficiently old game would now work on this thing. Let me show you one video of somebody I found who got Minecraft working on their TI calculator. 3D Minecraft on a TI-84, which I just installed. Okay. No way this actually works.
Oh, there's colors now. So, you can move around. And if you press enter, it'll open the inventory. Now, of course, we need a house. So, let's start by building the base. Apparently the house is floating. Ta-da. And of course, I have to blow it up. My calculator also has a sound feature, so I can play cat by C418. Wait, I almost forgot the self-promo.
These things are just computers. Like, again, these things are just computers. And Nilay, to your point, I think it was on that video I just showed you, the number one comment was, 'I like to call my TI-84 Plus my incognito Game Boy.'
Which is just still is what it is.
All computers are meant for playing games.
Yep. I think that's exactly right. So before we get to the true legacy of this device, there's one bit of semi-breaking calculator news I have to share with you, which is that as of this April, there's a new TI graphing calculator. Would you like to see the trailer?
I'm dying. Trailer. Hell yeah.
Not only is there a trailer, this trailer has almost 900,000 views on YouTube.
This is called the TI-84 Evo Graph. Here it is.
They made what I can only call a Samsung ad for this.
It has literally an app store, an app.
Yeah, they call it an icon-based home screen.
50% more graphing space. See more of the math at once.
3x faster processor is the lowest bar in history.
Oh my god. USB-C. There it is.
Approved for your biggest exams. I like the lilac. Yeah.
Oh, that red is hot, too. I don't like the fake app store.
