The

Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globall ...

TI-74 Basicalc is a type of programmable

calculator An electronic calculator is typically a portable electronic device used to perform calculations, ranging from basic arithmetic to complex mathematics. The first solid-state electronic calculator was created in the early 1960s. Pocket-sized ...

, which was released in 1985 to replace the

Compact Computer 40 The Compact Computer 40 or CC-40 is a portable computer developed by Texas Instruments. It started development in 1981, and was released in March 1983 for US$249. The CC-40 has a single-line 31 character LCD display, weighs 600 grams (22 ounc ...

. The TI-74's architecture is descended from the never-released TI CC-40 Plus. TI utilized the CC-40 Plus ROM to create the TI-74's BIOS; it removed the CC-40's internal debugger to gain enough space to add calculator mode to the TI-74. The CC-40 Plus' cassette routines were reused in the TI-74, and the CC-40's Hexbus port underwent a physical footprint change and was renamed to Dockbus. The Hexbus protocol is 100% compatible between the CC-40 and TI-74 with an adapter. One variant, the TI-74S, has a blank faceplate instead of secondary functions to allow for customization (otherwise it is the same as the 74). Both models accepted customized ROM-modules. The TI-95, released at the same time, was a keystroke programmable descendant of the

TI-59 The TI-59 is an early programmable calculator, that was manufactured by Texas Instruments from 1977. It is the successor to the TI SR-52, quadrupling the number of "program steps" of storage, and adding "ROM Program Modules" (an insertable ROM ...

and TI-66, with the same general form factor, but a two-line display (the second line was for function key definitions).

Technical specifications

*TMS70C46 CPU (C70009, another chip from TMS 7000 family also reported) *31 5×7 character LCD *32+4 KB ROM *8 KB RAM *RAM/ROM memory expansion port *

Hexbus The Texas Instruments Hex-Bus interface (sometimes used unhyphenated as Hex Bus and with varying capitalization) was designed in 1982 and intended for commercial release in late 1983. It connects the console to peripherals via a high-speed serial ...

port *80 characters per line (31 visible) *powered by 4 AAA-size batteries

References

External links

TI-74
o
MyCalcDB
(database about 1970s and 1980s pocket calculators) {{TI-calc Texas Instruments programmable calculators Pocket computers