In a nutshell: The Internet Archive has added a new family of emulators to its ever-growing repository of outdated technologies. Calculator Drawer is a new collection of simple and graphical calculators that have been emulated in MAME, a free open source emulator first released in 1997. The range of adding machines has an additional interactive graphic layer included by the MAME Artwork System, so you can interact with them as if they were right in front of you.
Jason Scott from the Internet Archive talks in more detail about how the MAME Artwork System works and how it was used by more than 1400 systems.
The calculator box currently consists of the following 14 machines:
- Hewlett-Packard 48G+
- Hewlett-Packard 48GX
- Hewlett-Packard 49G
- Hewlett-Packard 38G
- Texas Instruments TI-83 Plus
- Texas Instruments TI-73 Explorer
- Texas Instruments TI-81
- Texas Instruments TI-82
- Texas Instruments TI-85
- Texas Instruments TI-86
- Texas Instruments TI-89
- Texas Instruments TI-92
- Texas Instruments TI Voyager 200
- VTech Electronic Number Muncher
Depending on your age, a graphing calculator, such as one of the examples above from Texas Instruments, could be necessary for high school math classes in middle or high school. If my memory serves me right, I mostly worked with the TI-82. I’ve never gone too deep down the rabbit hole, but I remember other students practicing all sorts of tricks on their calculators and even figuring out how to load games on them.
The collection is accompanied by a bunch of operating manuals for those who need to refresh their knowledge on how to get the most out of them.
For those who crave the real thing, Texas Instruments still sells some of the calculators listed above, including the TI-73 Explorer and TI-84 Plus. Older models like the TI-82 are readily available on third-party marketplaces like eBay for a fraction of what they were sold for when they were brand new.
