08/05/2026
Packing up Walker Hall turned up something we did not know we still owned: an original LED TI-30 wired to an EduCALC classroom display, and both of them still work.
The TI-30 came out in June 1976 at $24.95, less than a good slide rule cost at the time. That price is why it showed up in classrooms so quickly. About 15 million were sold before the model was retired in 1983, which makes it one of the best selling calculators ever built.
The box it is plugged into solved a different problem. If you wanted thirty students to follow a keystroke sequence in 1978, you needed a display large enough to read from the back row. No projector, no software emulator, no screenshots. Just a nine digit LED panel sitting on the front desk, repeating whatever the instructor pressed.
Here it is doing 36 x 15. Forty-some years later it still lands on 540.
It's moving with us to Edwin Duncan Hall. If you took a math course at App State in the late 70s or 80s, we would like to know whether you remember seeing this thing in use, and who was teaching with it.
