It’s not just emulated video games on the Internet Archive: there are also scientific calculators. Including the models you used in school.
The high school years may now be very far behind you, but you certainly still have very vivid memories of that time. And maybe scientific calculators are one of them. We have, as far as we are concerned, still well in mind the famous TI-82 from Texas Instruments, which was part of all our math and physics-chemistry homework.
Your high school calculator, directly in your browser
If you miss these calculators, the latest Internet Archive initiative will please you : the American foundation has indeed had fun emulating the interfaces of these devices so that they can be used directly in a web browser, such as Firefox or Google Chrome. You can have fun doing calculations, drawing curves and manipulating functions.
Several models of calculators are now supported by the Internet Archive — they can be displayed in the directory The Calculator Drawer (which translates as the calculator drawer). Note that out of the fifteen devices, almost all come from Texas Instruments. Other brands, such as Casio, are not (yet) offered.
Calculator emulation is consistent with the Internet Archive’s missions. Its role is to browse the web to memorize its pages, free of charge and forever. For this, the service takes snapshots of the sites at different times and also collects representative elements of the web, such as video games or Flash animations.
The story does not say whether it is possible to launch Doom in one of these emulated calculators on the Internet Archive. For the record, this famous video game has become over time the reference to launch an unexpected program on a system – a cash register of McDonald’s, a pregnancy test, a connected watch and so on. Sure, Doom has already been launched on a real IT.
To operate these calculators, the Internet Archive relies on the MAME emulator (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator), which is a real Swiss army knife. The team behind the project has spent over 25 years adding support for tens of thousands of machines, platforms and tools to their emulation system “, notes the foundation on this subject.
Moreover, MAME has been extended to so many machines that there are even sites that do not bother to list the systems already supported… but which rather identify what is not Again emulated. The icing on the cake: the Internet Archive has also made available user manuals – in any case, a part. But who really reads them?
With the rise of smartphones and computers, many Internet users no longer necessarily need calculators as advanced as the models offered by Texas Instruments or Casio. For ordinary operations, much more basic models suffice… or applications, whether on Android, iOS, online or directly on the computer.
