Long-time readers of The New Leaf Journal may recall that I am fond of incorporating Ti-89 Titanium graphing calculator screen captures into writing content. I first had the idea in high school – when I created a title card for our school newspaper with a Ti-89 capture. Here at The New Leaf Journal, I included Ti-89 captures in three articles before future screen captures were thwarted by my move from Windows 10 to Linux in August 2020. But while I thought I was being novel and clever by writing a haiku or a boxing fight card on my Ti-89 and publishing a screen capture, I must concede that Mr. Tobias Mädel has far surpassed me in graphing calculator cleverness – he hosted an entire web-page on his Casio fx-9750GII graphical calculator.
Finding Graphing Calculator Webpage
I came across Mr. Mädel’s graphing calculator-hosted webpage while I was researching something on Hacker News. His graphing calculator page had been posted to Hacker News and, at the time I checked, was the most popular article among readers (note, it remains in first place more than eight hours later). We only reached sixth place in March with my article on RSS as a Facebook alternative. I must begrudgingly concede that hosting a webpage on a graphing calculator is cooler than my RSS take.
The Homepage
When I first saw the graphing calculator homepage, I quickly archived it with the Wayback Machine in case the rush of traffic from Hacker News proved to be too much for the industrious Casio fx-9750GII. I distinctly recall that The New Leaf Journal did not entirely like the rush of traffic it got from Hacker News back in March. However, as of the time of this writing, the graphing calculator homepage is standing strong.
The page has the following text:
Welcome! This page is hosted on an Casio fx-9750GII graphical calculator, running a SuperH SH4 processor. It’s running a port of the ulP TCP/IP stack, using SLIP over the 3pin 2.5mm serial port.
Text for Tobias Mädel graphing calculator-hosted web-page
I’ll take Mr. Mädel’s word for it.
The page features two pictures of the world’s bravest little web-server in action, although Mr. Mädel notes that the pictures are not hosted on the calculator.
Aside – I think Mr. Mädel should have written the page from the calculator’s perspective. That would have been neat. Imagine this:
Welcome! I’m Mr. Casio fx-9750GII, a graphing calculator. I am hard at work hosting this webpage. How do I do it? I’m running a SuperH SH4 processor and a port of the uIP TCP/IP stack, using SLIP over the 3pin 2.5mm serial port. Honestly, I have no idea what this means – I’m just a humble calculator hosting a webpage.
My interpretation of the graphing calculator’s thoughts
Coding is not enough. You have to know how to listen to your device.
Host Your Own Graphing Calculator Website
Mr. Mädel has made the source code for his TCP/IP stack available on GitHub. If you have a spare Casio fx-9860/9750, some programming acumen, and a good amount of spare time, you can try to host your own graphing calculator webpage just like Mr. Mädel did. Furthermore, he also included code for an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client for the calculator. You can watch a video of Mr. Mädelsending an IRC message from his calculator.
I Tip My Visor to Mr. Mandel
All jokes aside, Mr. Mädel graphing calculator web server and IRC client is as impressive as it is amusing. I am glad to see that he is earning well-deserved attention and praise for the project, and that the attention did not immediately crash his graphing calculator server. It looks like he has plenty of other fun projects on his personal website and YouTube channel.
Here at The New Leaf Journal, I am working on a less ambitious project – installing something to take screenshots on my Linux desktop. I think I may have a solution – now I just need to find some batteries for my Ti-89.