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TI-58/59 programmable calculator

The TI-58 and TI-59 were early programmable calculators from Texas Instruments. The TI-59 has up to 960 user program steps or 100 memories, the TI-58 has up to 480 program steps or 60 memories. Starting on a TI-58, I later continued with a TI-59 and I wrote many small programs for these calculators, mainly concerning astronomy and some about physics and mathematics.

Enthusiast use of the TI-58/59 is described in: Dejan Ristanovic, Jelica Protic, Once Upon a Pocket: Programmable Calculators from Late 1970s and Early 1980s and the Social Networks around them, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 01 Sept. 2011, IEEE computer Society Digital Library. An abstract is available at doi: 10.1109/MAHC.2011.63.

An example of professional use is described in: W.H. Lehn, A simple parabolic model for the optics of the atmospheric surface layer, Applied Mathematical Modelling, Volume 9, Issue 6, December 1985, Pages 447-453. An abstract is available at doi: 10.1016/0307-904X(85)90111-8.

Nowadays the TI-58/59 can also be found in a museum. The Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn (DE) has a large collection of pocket calculators (german page), including the TI-58/59. Another specimen is in the collection in one of the Science Park buildings of the University of Amsterdam.

For more information on these calculators, see for instance the TI-59 home page and the Wikipedia articles on the TI-58 and the TI-59.