My journal entry is about the TI-85, the fully functional graphing calculator sitting in front of me. The 85 does everything for you, related to math, of course. You can do any type of equations on it, to any degree, and graph any function or equation. You can even play games on it, like Z-PONG, Texanoid, Connect-4, Tron and others. This calculator can be programmed using the BASIC language. It has 32Kb of RAM, which is sufficient for hundreds of games and programs.

It sits there now. Who knows what will take its place in the future! Just imagine what sat there before it. Decades ago and even in the '80s, most of the work now done on the calculator had to be done manually with "Reference Tables." My father remembers looking up all the values of the six trigonometric functions and the values of logs and log naturals. Nowadays these values are all at the push of a button. Such calculators back in the '60s, '70s and '80s were two or three times the size. They could only do half or one-third of the functions of the 85 and other calculators.

In the future the calculators will become considerably smaller, and people will say, "Wow! Calculators are half the size they used to be in the '90s." By that time they will be up to the TI-150 (or something like that), which will be able to do two or three times the number of functions of the 85. Tables or information that might be implemented are: Physics formulas, Chemistry formulas, Periodic Table of the Elements, with each element giving the atomic mass and atomic number, and several other formulas including the conversions from Celsius to Fahrenheit to Kelvin and vice versa. Also, the future of calculators foresees cheaper, easier, and smaller machines. More companies and more research will be devoted to the production of these portable, do-it-all calculators.