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After Texas Instruments researcher Jack S. Kilby invented the integrated circuit in 1958, he went looking for applications for microchips. One of the things he tried was coupling a chip with a keypad and a simple numeric display -- and the handheld digital calculator was born. While TI has gotten in and mostly out of a variety of consumer product lines over the years, it has always stuck with the calculator business, which it continues to dominate -- especially the lucrative market for the high-end calculators used in schools.
TI's latest product, the TI-83 Plus Silver Edition, shows why. It's the latest version of a graphic calculator line that has been around for more than a decade and does a neat job of melding old technology with new. Its heart is a Z-80 processor, which powered the first generation of what were then called microcomputers. But the design has been updated with the addition of 1.5 megabytes of flash memory, which makes it possible to load a huge variety of programs into the calculator.
COTTAGE INDUSTRY. TI supplies such extras as a periodic table of the elements for chemistry class, a probability simulation for statistics, a simple organizer, and flash cards for memory drills. And a cottage industry has sprung up around creating new software programs for the TIs (see http://www.education.ti.com or http://www.ticalc.org).
The 83 Plus Silver costs about $130. That's around $30 more than the standard 83 Plus, which lacks the extra memory and some other features. It's just a bit more than I paid, without adjustment for inflation, for a primitive four-function TI calculator 30 years ago. The 83 Plus has a huge variety of mathematical functions built in, a 50-button keypad, and a display that shows both text and low-resolution graphics.
While there's a lot of controversy among educators about the use of calculators in elementary math classes, the graphing calculators are standard tools in high schools, and many schools require them for upper-level math classes. Though Hewlett-Packard, Casio, and Sharp all make perfectly good devices, TI owns the U.S. market. Over the years, the company has worked closely with teachers, school systems, and textbook writers with the result that a lot of math curriculums have been developed specifically with the TI models in mind.
BROWSER NEXT? TI is now trying to push the concept further with a way to connect the calculators to school networks. It would be prohibitively expensive to build wireless networking capability into calculators. Instead, TI's Navigator system allows students to plug into a network hub with the standard cables used to link calculators to computers. The hubs then connect to the teacher's workstation. With this setup, a teacher can download programs, statistical data sets, or even test questions simultaneously to all the students. A Web browser for calculators probably isn't far behind.
Navigator isn't cheap. The system costs $9,800 for a complete classroom system, including hubs, charging stations, and the teacher's workstation. But TI is offering a deal of $5,500 per classroom for schools that sign up early and help develop a curriculum for the system. That's the same approach that won the company its market dominance, and it looks as if TI will stay on top for the foreseeable future.
Wildstrom is Technology & You columnist for BusinessWeek. Follow his Flash Product Reviews, only on BW Online Edited by Beth Belton
Copyright 2001 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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