TEXAS INSTRUMENTS MADE POWERFUL CALCULATORS

Yeah, Your Phone Could Eat a TI-83 for Breakfast (And Still Have Room for TikTok)

Hey there! Grab a snack (or your phone—because of course you will), and let's chat about those chunky graphing calculators from the 90s that once felt like supercomputers... until you hold one next to today's pocket brick.

Sleek modern minimalist smartphone

Modern phones: sleek, powerful, and tiny compared to the old bricks

Back in the day—think mid-to-late 90s, when dial-up was still a thing and flip phones were the hot new gadget—the Texas Instruments TI-83 (and its beefier cousins like the TI-89) ruled high-school math classes. Kids guarded them like rare Pokémon cards. You could graph functions, solve matrices, maybe even sneak in a tiny game of Tetris if you knew the right cheat codes.

Futuristic modern smartphone on black background

Today's budget phones pack insane power in a slim package

Fast-forward to 2026, and even the most basic budget smartphone laughs at those old beasts.

The TI-83 ran on a whopping 6 MHz Z80 processor—that's slower than the processor in your average wireless mouse today. RAM? About 24 KB. Yes, kilobytes. Your current phone probably has millions of times more working memory just to open the calculator app.

And storage? The TI-83 Plus topped out at around 160 KB for your programs and saved graphs. A cheap phone in 2026 starts at 64 GB—that's like giving the old calculator several football fields worth of space compared to its tiny desk drawer.

Retro tech vibe - old computer keyboard

Retro tech nostalgia: those pixelated screens had charm

The real mind-blower? Your phone can run full emulators of the TI-83/84 right now. Smooth. Fast. With color if you want. While it's also streaming music, texting friends, and reminding you to drink water. The 90s calculator is basically a cute pet rock in comparison.

Yet... there's something oddly charming about those old machines. No notifications. No doomscrolling. Just you, some polynomials, and maybe a poorly drawn stick-figure Mario clone someone programmed in assembly.

Vintage old phone for retro comparison

Old-school simplicity vs. today's everything-machine

Bottom line: Tech progress is wild. What took a dedicated $100+ device in 1996 now lives as a free app on something you use to check the weather. But every time I see a kid still pulling out a TI-84 in class, I smile. Some things are sacred... or at least exam-proof.

What do you think—miss the simplicity, or happy to let your phone do the heavy lifting? 😄 Drop a comment!

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