Comment by CobrastanJorji
2 days ago
They did! The TI-89 is how I aced the AP Math exam.
The TI-92 had recently come out, and it had a QWERTY keyboard and could solve symbolic calculus problems like "find the derivative of 2x^3". This was a problem for the AP exam, since you could just type in the problem and get the answer. They fixed this by banning calculators with QWERTY keyboards. That's just about exactly when the TI-89 came out, which also did symbolic calculus but did not have a QWERTY keyboard, and so it was totally allowed on the exam. Boom, 5/5 exam score for Jorji.
Got the 89 first year it came out, loaded a periodic table on it and used it on my high school chemistry exam. Teachers had no clue back then
I had a similar story -- just absolutely acing math with my TI-89 until one teacher finally learned that this TI-83-looking calculator could do symbolic stuff ... just an absolute nightmare after that
Spent some time on ticalc.org too, making some not-great stuff to get me thru those years
https://www.ticalc.org/cgi-bin/acct-view.cgi?userid=34493