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Texas Instruments LCD Programmer

Date of introduction:  April 1982 Display technology:  LCD
New price:  $50.00 Display size:  8 
Size:  5.8" x 3.1" x 0.90"
 147 x 79 x 23 mm3
   
Weight:  3.7 ounces, 106 grams Serial No:  83597851
Batteries:  2*LR44 Date of manufacture:  wk 26 year 1983
AC-Adapter:   Origin of manufacture:  USA
Precision:  9 Integrated circuits:  TP0455/CD4519 or TP0456/CD4569
Memories:  1    
Program steps:    Courtesy of:  Joerg Woerner
    Download manual: (US: 4.5M Bytes)

The TI LCD Programmer is a very unusual calculator doing math not only on the base-10 system like our natural life but on base-8 and base-16, too. Long before SW-engineers got nice languages like JAVA or C++ they were used to program the microcontrollers in their native assembler languages. The only operations such a microcontroller is executing, are simple instructions to manipulate data. With the TI Programmer you could simulate these operations, e.g. AND, OR, XOR and SHIFT's in the data format of modern microcontrollers (hex or base-16) or old-fashioned minicomputers (octal or base-8). 

TI-LCD-Programmer_PCB.jpg (159562 Byte)From the technical aspects the TI Programmer is at first glance nothing else than a TI-55-II with one removed line of keys to give the layout of the TI Programmer known from the Majestic line. Dismantling the calculator reveals with the CD4569 a single-chip architecture based on the TP0456 calculator circuit family.

Four years later this LCD Programmer was replaced with the Programmer II sporting the new slanted housing like the TI-55-III.

Read more about George Boole, the inventor of the Boolean algebra.



The TI LCD Programmer is featured in the Texas Instruments Incorporated leaflet CL-199M dated 1983.

 

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

© Joerg Woerner, December 5, 2001. No reprints without written permission.