> Our school got a special deal on TI-86s (about half price IIRC).  As you can 
> imagine, within a few weeks everyone was playing super mario and tetris 
> during lessons :-)

LMAO!

Yeah, that sounds about right...


At my school, the staff didn't really "understand" new-fangled things 
like electrisity, etc. After many years, we eventually got a few 186 
PCs. Within about 4 weeks somebody had figured out that the teacher's 
password was "teacher", and had installed the (then very new) Doom on 
the PC. (Inside a folder called ".", IIRC. This made running the program 
rather difficult! But that was the idea... tho personally I don't think 
they need have bothered.)


Seriously though - I currently have a graphing calculator which is 
"programmable". That is, you can make the menus appear in a pre-scripted 
order, and fill in some of the fields with hard-coded values. Or even 
the contents of variables (of which there are 26 available). What you 
*can't* do is conditional branching, looping, subroutines, user input...

The calculator has a feature to graph a table, and to tabulate a 
function, and to tabulate a recursive function. But if the recursion 
isn't one of the 3 formats the calculator supports... you *cannot* 
compute it automatically. You must do it by hand. Oh, and you can't 
build a table by hand. In short, without using lots of paper, it is 
*impossible* to graph anything except an explicit function or a few 
specific kinds of recursion. Very programmable...

I'm hoping that a TI-81 wouldn't have such limitations.

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