Texas Instruments TI-30X IIS (Underwood Distributing Co.)

Jake Smarkusky, Managing Director of Underwood Distributing Co., surprised us a few days after we published our annual Back-to-School 2023 update of the Datamath Calculator Museum with pictures of both a lime-green and an orange TI-30X IIS. At first glance not too exciting, we still remember them from the the Back-to-School 2011 campaign. Retailer Target offered a lime-green TI-30X IIS while Staples had the orange TI-30X IIS on their shelves. But Jake sent some pictures of both disassembled calculators and their sales boxes and we noticed that they were not manufactured in 2011 but as recent as January 2023. Thanks, Jake! Usually we use Texas Instruments "Retail Colors" webpage as reference for our updates but they missed not only mentioning Target's white TI-84 Plus but these two TI-30X IIS, too.

Disassembling the featured lime-green TI-30X IIS manufactured January 2023 by Kinpo Electronics, Inc. in the Philippines reveals a well known internal construction centered around an unknown single-chip calculator circuit and powered by four small solar cells and a CR2025 backup battery. We discovered already in 2004 with Inventec Shanghai, Kinpo Electronics, Inc. and Nam Tai Electronics, Inc. three different contract manufacturers for the TI-30X IIS. Comparing two calculators with Date codes K-0304 and K-0409 yields no significant differences.

Inspecting the PCB of this TI-30X IIS calculator brought our attention to two small marks reading SR16N/N1-11 and SR16/SR16B-23, we noticed similar marks already with other Slide Rule calculators manufactured by Kinpo Electronics and started compiling a list of the PCB-Marks on calculators manufactured by OEMs for Texas Instruments.

If you have additions to the above article please email: joerg@datamath.org.

© Joerg Woerner, August 21, 2023. No reprints without written permission.