THE JO-TEL … illegal blog downfield

For some reason I was on the BART looking at highway shrubs stream by my window, when I remembered how pervasively we all used to use TI calculators to cheat in high school. There were two different levels of cheating: venal and mortal, if you will allow the metaphor.

Venal being when you would, for instance, use a program to figure the quadratic formula or the area under a curve on a test where the whole point was to figure out the guadratic formula or the area under a curve by hand. Teachers quickly caught on to this relatively harmless form of cheating and “cracked down” by forcing us to delete all of our programs before a test. Of course, this resulted in the creation of the ever-popular “Mem Cleared” program, which would, as its title implied, make your screen say “Mem Cleared” as if you have just deleted your memory.

The mortal type of TI cheating was handy on multiple-choice tests whose answers you were able to somehow procure (usually by asking someone who took the test in an earlier period). These could be easy programed and displayed. For higher-level cheaters, and those more concerned with not getting caught, the preferred strategy was to create a program, usually called something like “Circle”, that was just the letters of the correct answers with no other programming so that if a teacher should ever try to find the answers they would run “Circle” and get an error message and assume that you didn’t use that program when, in fact, you accessed the answers with “Circle” by simply ‘editing” the program. Shame on us.

Then of course there was that nerd with thick glasses who created the Star Wars TI-82 game where you piloted the X-Wing through the Death Star’s trench before trying to make a direct hit on the star-base’s core with the proton torpedo. Its only flaw was that it was a little bit too easy to beat. Come on, Brendan Dixon!