Talk:TI-59 / TI-58

Use of the magnetic cards for program documentation

I've added the following, which is illustrated in the video:

The video also shows the dual use of the magnetic card as a program documentation menu. Notes could be printed or handwritten by the programmer on the top side of the magnetic card. Once read by the cardreader, the card could then be stored, as shown, in a slot between the top of the keyboard and the display, thus providing a notation indicating both the name of the program currently loaded and the purpose of each of the five label buttons A-E within the loaded program.

This is partly from my own fading 32-year-old memory, but is also corroborated here where the writer is discussing the fidelity of a software emulation:

The only user interface item absent compared to the original is the card slot for the magnetic and plastic cards, on which the user definable label key associations could be printed or written by hand.

So including me, that's two old buggers who used this device in anger. I daresay the original manuals are around and would definitively corroborate this. --TS 02:55, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

A couple of photographs on this linked page also show cards with printed annotations and some blanks with spaces for label key annotations. The five keys allowed ten labels to be addressed (I seem to recall the "2nd" key was used as a shift to double the number of addressable labels) so there are two rows of five boxes that, when the card is placed in the slot between the keypad and the display, correspond to the five alphabetic keys at the top, labelled A-E. Cards MU-02 and MU-03 in the Mathematics Module photograph perhaps illustrate the usage best. Sadly those photographs are probably not free media. --TS 03:19, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Indeed. The magnetic cards could be written on. In pencil (if you wanted to erase) or ink. And yes, there were both A-E, and 2nd A-E (commonly called A’ – E’) for labels. You can see the blank spaces in both the card in the slot and the one about to run through the reader in the TI-59 picture in the top infobox. There's an illustration of that on page VII-2 of the "Personal Programming" manual, which you can see here:

http://alt.vttoth.com/ftp/CALCDOCS//TI/TI-58C-59.pdf

There were also blank, non-magnetic cards, which you would write on and use in the TI-58 (although there was obviously no way to store a user program). Rwessel (talk) 06:59, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Example Factorial Program

I tried the factorial program out and its not working, the recursive decrements seems to be working when debug it using the tape printer but the answer is coming out wrong. Is there a step missing between

sto 1

1

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 158.106.48.10 (talk • contribs) 21:12, 23 August 2016 (UTC)