24k #3 -- Monopoly

I … no, I can’t do it. I’m just going to completely phone this one in. No Dall-e art. No long reflection on a childhood misspent with quirky 8-bit machines. TI has been phoning it in with this machine for years and I’m just going to match that energy.

The Texas Instruments TI-84 Plus graphing calculator is our third 24k machine for 2024. It has more total memory, but 24k is what’s user available. For certain values of user and available. This calculator was introduced in 2004 with a list price of $150 and TI has been flogging it with almost no changes for 20 years. With inflation driving the price of everything up, up, up (you could graph that on the TI, by the way) the price of the TI has been the ever-fixed mark. It looks on tempests and is never shaken. Maybe a little shaken. It’s available on staples.com now for $142.99. If you bought one of these pre-smartphone-without-the phone gizmos in the last 19 or so of that score, then you’re the mark. You basically bought a 1990 Nintendo Game Boy a decade past its sell-by date. You also overpaid.

I’m almost embarrassed to write this post. The Washington Post basically wrote it already, a decade ago.

In an era of profoundly deflationary computing, the TI calculator costs many consumers twice the final retail price of TI’s home machine from 20 years earlier still. The TI-99/4A was available for $49 at the end of its run in 1984. Like that earlier machine, the TI-84 has been bought by parents around the country with the hope that it would give their children the edge needed to compete in the competitive (but oddly low-spec) knowledge economy of the future.

TI learned from the expensive failure of the 99/4A. You don’t need a good machine to be competitive. You just need an army of educators and publishers to teach to your product and then never, ever let go. Monopoly, of course, is available for the TI-84 (here).

Here at Paper Tiger, we expect our readers to be better gamblers. Know when to hold’em, know when to fold’em, know when to walk away. Know when to run.

Although the TI-84 is approved for use on the ACT and SAT _and also_ has more available poker programs than contemporary Z80 platforms, you should still never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table. There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.

This post pairs well with “The Gambler”/“The Gambler”/Kenny Rogers/1978.