For those engineering types, who have not lost their love of the hand-held calculator, the Texas Instrument TI-92 is a unit to behold. As one who used a slide rule in school and then moved to the calculator in the 70’s, calculators hold a special place in my heart. My wife is always asking me if I really need to buy that calculator when I have a drawer full of them!
The TI-92 gives the math power of a computer in a package that is, a little bigger than a paperback novel. In addition to being a scientific calculator, it does symbolic manipulation and equation simplification, geometric graphing, statistical operations and plotting, graphing, and programming. The unit even performs Calculus functions such as differentiation and integration.
The TI-92 has a high resolution graphics display and a QWERTY keyboard in addition to the function keys normally found on a scientific calculator. The size of the keyboard makes it a little hard to touch type but one finger typing works pretty well.
If you are used to buying a calculator that has the instructions printed on the back of the box, the TI-92’s 500 page manual will be a pleasant surprise. Each function of the calculator is explained and accompanied with examples.
To say that I was blown away by the TI-92 would be putting it mildly as the unit hasn’t left the top of my desk. Other than the fact that the unit is larger and heavier than the average calculator, it would be a good present for that engineer or scientist to be.