The TiLP project plus my incoming graphlink USB cable will allow me to dump to and fro from my desktop to my TI-83 graphing calculator! I can’t wait!
(FULL DISCLOSURE: I am a full-on math retard who has never, not once, acheived a grade higher than a D- in any math-oriented class. It’s like being tone deaf. I hate it.
I should actually explore this at greater length, since verbal and symbolic logic have always been the merest trifles to me. Somehow, if you call it math, I lose all aptitude and become Monsieur Hulot.
Well-meaning, capable of discretion and careful distinction, able to restate and clarify the most arcane points of procedure verbally, I immediately become a pratfalling, limb-tangling menace and figure of fun in any given math-oriented learning environment.
Still, my earliest programming experience was writing BASIC demos on a hand-held japanese calculator in 1982, and I still remember my dad coming home from work in Boston, circa 1972, with a blue-plastic TI calculator that had cool blue LEDs and operated via a metal, hardwired stylus clacking against brass-tone contact points. It was boss cool.)
UPDATE: oops, it wasn’t a TI. It was almost surely a Litton Industries Royal IV , one of only two models of calculator known to employ a stylus back in the day. I remember, as a little kid when Dad brought it home, asking why it didn’t use buttons. He told me that “studies” had indicated a higher degree of accuracy (fewer fumbled digit entries) in input. I recall being skeptical, but there’s a germ of something there: we’ve employed sticks held in the hand to make expressive and information-carrying marks for longer than we’ve been writing. It can be argued that the stylus is a more mature technology than all others but for weapons, bread, and beer.
It’s definitely more mature than the button.