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| It started back in the 1980s. TI PPC
Exchange published 'TI-59 Test' written
by Maurice Swinnen, Texas Instruments professional
productivity program instructor who designed the test for use with
seminar students. I read the test and said 'All too easy' - yes, I
just returned from the cinema after watching the premiere of 'The Empire
Strike Back'. So I decided to write a 'better' test. The result was 'TI-59
supertest, intended for the fanatics, the ones that sleep with their
calculator and in the middle of the night wake up to try out some routine
they have been dreaming about', as Maurice Swinnen described it in
TI PPC Notes v7n9p8. The test was accompanied by the
program that used neat techniques of keyboard branching during program
execution, and the answers themselves were not part of the program, but were
calculated using the random numbers generator with specially prepared seed.
I don't know how many TI-59 users took the test at the time, but quite a few
of them mentioned some of the questions in later correspondence. The other day, nearly a quarter of a century later, I tried 'TI-59 Supertest' myself and managed to answer only 2 out of 20 questions. Well, actually I scored three, but the third answer was the lucky guess. So much for the human memory. But that gave me an idea - why not write a new, much easier test, and offer it to the TI-59 community (or what is left of it, anyway)? So here it goes - how well do you remember your old calculator?
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