Some TI calculators have never been sold in North America. They are manufactured in Italy and were sold in Europe only. Two examples are presented here.
TI-1260
Labeled “Calculator for the modern woman”, the manual is in German and French, showing the intended market. The calculator has functions to compute the cost of goods purchased in bulk: you enter the weight, the price per kilogram, and the calculator computes the cost.
When I was young they taught us that this is called “multiplication” and of course any calculator does that already. I guess that explains the huge success this calculator had (not!). Not very often encountered.
TI-15
Did you know that according to the Datamath Museum that the TI-30 is probably the calculator produced in the greatest numbers ever? I didn’t know either, interesting fact.
But what does the TI-15, which after all has only basic slide rule functions (square root, reciprocal), have to do with the TI-30 which is a fully functional scientific calculator?
Well, it has everything. The TI-15 is a fully functional TI-30 under the hood. See the empty spaces on the TI-15 keyboard? The TI-30 has keys in those spaces for sin, cos, log, etc.
The keyboard beneath the calculator face is also fully functional, if you remove the calculator board and manually press the corresponding key, you can actually compute sin, cos, ln, etc.
However, and I think everyone can agree here, the TI-15 is more colorful!
