i'm guessing "the portable arithmetic asshole" wasn't a catchy name

[rone]

OK, nostalgia time: Texas Instruments' Little Professor.  Who here didn't spend their time as a young child obsessively crunching numbers in their head thanks to this handheld taskmaster?  It was apparently updated at some point, but the new version lacks the charm and stolidity of the original.  There ought to be a Wii version, damn it.  Kids these days are missing out.

Comments

[askesis.livejournal.com]

I had the Dataman. (http://www.datamath.org/Edu/Images/Dataman.jpg)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I had more fun with the Speak & Spell. Not so much for its intended educational purpose as just for the tech-demo amazingness of electronic voice synthesis in a toy.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

The Speak & Spell became 10 times as entertaining once its batteries started to go.

[stoneself.livejournal.com]

*snrk*
not while i'm drinking!

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

I had a Speak & Spell AND a Speak & Math.

We were very lower-middle-class but somehow in the early 80's we could afford something that was electronic and could talk. But none of the expansion cartridges.

And it was also the reason I remembered what shape Texas was once I started learning states.

[smashingstars.livejournal.com]

We had this guy (http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/_standard_type_1_.html) for the longest time, and a TI similar to this one (http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/texas_insturments_ti_58.html) which I loved, but died in the late '80s. I still have a third one from the early 70s around here somewhere, it works, but I have no idea what brand it is.

But yeah, I didn't get any wussypants calculators, because dad was a math teacher and moderate technogeek. One of my first toys was a freakin' abacus.

[oh6.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of prickvixen's incantor.

(I just did multiplication drills on a program my father wrote for his HP-65, but I've mentioned this before.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, mine too. When I was in the fourth grade or so, he got me an Omron scientific calculator (http://www.vintagecalculators.com/Omron86SR_1.jpg) that was one of the first affordable ones to have things like trig and hyperbolic functions. I didn't know what any of those things were back then but it made me curious about them.

I wish I hadn't lost the slide rule he gave me a little later--it was a really nice-looking wooden slide rule with a bunch of specialized scales; its only defect was a hairline crack in the glass cursor.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...but that programmable TI is way more awesome. I think I knew somebody who had one of those.

[omarius.livejournal.com]

I had one of these! And had forgotten all about it. Nice memory dredge there.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Now spell, Bleh. As in, Bleh.

Wrong! Try again. Now spell, Bleh. As in, Bleh.

[jwgh]

The Little Professor was instrumental in getting me to remember what 6x7 and 7x8 are.

[smashingstars.livejournal.com]

Dad had a slide rule or two, but I don't know where they went. He occasionally threatened to teach me how to use one but never did, which I'm okay with. My fear of math would have strained his meager teaching skills.

[schwa242.livejournal.com]

I had both. Dataman was much more fun.

[richtermom.livejournal.com]

OMG YES. I must buy my kid an abacus. YES!!!!

OH THAT'S SO GREAT!

her birthday isn't until feb, Christmas isn't for five months, but a "back to school" present sounds just right....

[richtermom.livejournal.com]

My sister got it.

She got all the cool stuff.

My mom claimed that I would sit on the floor unknotting yarn for hours, and I imagine she never tried to give me an actual TOY or something.

[dpk.livejournal.com]

My dad (an electrical engineer) had one of these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-12C

and would let us play with it. (It might've been the 11C). I remember not "getting" RPN at first, and I remember using it for games. There was a battleship game for it which let you use sonar to hunt down the computer's ships. You had to write down the responses so you could keep track of hits & misses. Neat stuff.

[sambushell.livejournal.com]

I had a Little Professor and had school friends who had Dataman. I recognise the IP but not the name... maybe it had a different brand name in Aus. Dataman did seem like more fun (more variety of games) but then, it had the grass-on-the-other-side nature.

Before long, I'm going to want to find equivalents for these kinds of mathematical games as iPhone OS apps.

[gallifreyan.livejournal.com]

Me too--actually wore one out and had to get another.... More info on Dataman: http://www.handheldmuseum.com/TI/Dataman.htm