Ti 83 ? 86 ?! Hell I though you were older than me not younger !
I was born in 1977, and AFAIR when I was at school the TI range was the TI 81, 82 and 85.
81 was a bit bottom of the barrel to my liking back then... well no honestly I just hated the colour. Much preferred the gray of the 82, so I convinced my mum to fork out 750 Francs for it. Was a huge sum for her, so I was very thankful. Well I think our applied physics teacher did also recommend the 82, to boot.
I loved it, it's well suited / tailored to engineering I find. The 85 was so expensive that only one guy in my class had it. But I didn't like it because it was more suited to pure science and math... the K/B layout was not as practical for engineering I found. some basic functions were not as easy to access I found. Still, I was jealous of his 85... so 25 years later, recently, since they are now dirt cheap, I got one, got my revenge ! About 5 years ago. When I received it, I had a "surprise"... inside the slide cover, there was something written on it in big letters, by hand with I don't know, nail varnish or something similar, but silver looking. Like the conductive varnish to repair heated rear screens on cars.... anyway it read : " BASTARD !!! ". Yes in French it means the same as it does in English !
The seller omitted to inform of this...
So I scrapped the varnish as best I could, but still !
Anyway as I said the 85 is a pain for basic engineering tasks I find, so I would much prefer using my own 82 of back in the day. Problem is that the LCD is kaput, vertical lines all over it
I guess I could try to heat the cable see if that fixes it....
Anyway. Back at school, circa 1995 or 1996, other than that ONE class mate with a 85, there were two other mates that had a one-off as well. One had a Ti 92 ! A monster calculator, more of a portable computer than a calculator. huge screen, mega large K/B, needs to hands to operate it, a monster. Runs on a 68K CPU with 128K of RAM. Way too big and heavy in the bag to be practical, but boy in awe all we were, blown away by this thing !!!!
Then another guy had an HP 48 ! I remember I found it very "expensive". I mean the quality of the material and that of the build./construction, looked much better than the Ti. Also had a lovely comfy velvety pouch to keep it warm ! ISTR I found the quality of LCD better than the Ti. Had a cool Infra red link rather than a wired/cable for the Ti, however since the HP was so expensive he was the only one with a HP so had other calculator to connect to !
I do seem to remember however, that I didn't like the K/B at all ! It was 25 years ago so am not 100% sure, but I think I found the keys hard to press and noisy, compared to my Ti 82. Made typing both uncomfortable and slow. Again, old memories so could be off...
So yeah, at school it was either 82 for most of us, and 85 / HP 48 or Ti 92 for the more wealthy of us.
Slightly older than you but not much
To note, most of the calculators I have owned were well past the date they were introduced. This was because of a passing interest in collecting the infernal things. At one point I had 54 different calculators.
Also I used to buy and sell TI calculators here in medium quantities (tens of them at a time). There was a little niche where broke students where bouncing them for beer money at the end of the school or university year and then paying an absolute fortune for them just before it started because the entire supply was rinsed. I would at average buy for £7 and sell for £40. Do this 100 times and it's a good summer earner. This was a 6 week process of having stacks of mostly TI-83's on my desk, cleaning them up and refurbing them and testing them.
On the TI graphing line I have owned a TI-81, TI-82, more TI-83's than I can count, TI-85, TI-86, TI-89, TI-89 titanium, TI-92, Voyage 200, nSpire CAS.
But professionally and educationally speaking my timeline is roughly:
1984 -> Casio FX-82
1988 -> Casio FX-4000P
1990 -> TI-81
1993 -> HP 48G (this disappeared some time around 2003)
2003 to 2017 -> mostly excel intermission
2017 -> HP 50G / 35S (switch back and forth on and off)
The HP 35S is the nice sweet spot calculator now. It's programmable enough and I don't have to refer to the manual every bloody time I want to remember how to do something like the 50G
As for the TI-92, I did indeed own one for a bit. Very nice machine but quite frankly it's still a TI-89 in a big box. That's not all bad but difficult to rationalise at the time and now. One of my university lecturers had one which was plugged into the large projector adapter which was quite fun to watch.
I actually wrote my first piece of commercial software on the TI-81. This was a horse racing gambling game which sold for 50p a copy and was typed in by hand from memory. If you paid me £2 extra you could get a set of PRNG seeds which guaranteed winners ... I had a real problem with software licensing when someone got a TI-82 and link cable
WOW, you are the man for calculators !!!
At least if I have a calculator question I know who to ask....
Casio FX4000P yes had one too !! Just for one year. That's the first programmable calculator school asked us to buy. Then the following year they said it was not good enough and asked us for a Ti 81 or 82, and most like me went for the 82.
But I loved the FX4000P a lot and still have it today 30 years later (pretty much spot on I think) !!!
I prefer it to the Ti 82 for basic stuff because it's more compact, slimmer, lighter, and better overall quality I find. Metallic case, better LCD screen though not graphical of course.
I would use it all the time but I never do because... when I dug it out a few years back, batteries were drained of course. So I put new ones in, but it takes two different types of coin batteries IIRC, expensive... and a few days later they were drained again, lots of money wasted !!!
So if I want to ever use it again, and I would love to, I need to crack it open and try to fix it... maybe there is a shorted/failed decoupling cap across the batteries somewhere ?!
If it's the chip that's dead then the poor calculator is toast
.. but I hope it's a simple fix, I really love this little thing ! Still have the original box for it, and paper manual as well !
Same for my Ti 82, would love to revive it, so I need to crack it open and fix that LCD ! I also have its original box with manuals, serial port adapter to plug it to a desktop computer, and the S/W on a floppy disk as well IIRC. The whole kit !!
But until I get round to fixing these two old calculators of mine, I get lazy and just use that used Ti 85 acquired recently, because that's the only one that's in working condition for now !