The LCD Generations, 1978 to Today

The LED scientifics of the 1970s ate batteries: the HP-35 ran three to five hours on a charge, the TI-30 needed a 9-volt cell. Liquid-crystal displays used almost nothing, and once they arrived the scientific calculator settled into the form it still has: a slim case, a long battery life or a solar cell, and more functions every few years. The big changes since have been in the display: from one line of seven-segment digits to two lines, then to dot-matrix screens that show mathematics as it is printed.

Figure 1 — Three generations of Casio scientific: the fx-82MS of 2001 with its two-line display, the fx-991ES with Natural Display, and the fx-991EX ClassWiz with its higher-resolution screen. — Photo: J. C. Barros, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

3.1 Liquid crystal and the sun

Sharp’s EL-805 of 1973 was the first calculator with a liquid-crystal display, with the display, a CMOS chip and the wiring on one piece of glass; it ran about 100 hours on a single AA cell. Texas Instruments sold an LCD TI-30 in Europe from 1978. The first solar calculators followed at the end of the 1970s: Sharp’s EL-8026 “Sun Man”, whose cells recharged a battery, and the Teal Photon, which ran on light alone and needed bright light to do it. Solar scientifics followed in the early 1980s; Casio’s fx-910 is dated to 1980 by one source and 1984 by another. Today the usual arrangement is a strip of amorphous-silicon cells with a button cell behind it, so the calculator works in a dim room.

Figure 2 — The Teal Photon of about 1978, one of the first solar-powered calculators, with a yellow-filtered LCD. — Photo: Joe Haupt, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

3.2 The Casio fx-82 line

Casio has used the number fx-82 since 1982 for its basic school scientific, and the line runs to the present:

Table 1 — Casio has used the number fx-82 since 1982 for its basic school scientific, and the line runs to the present

Model	Year	What changed
fx-82	1982	the first, an LCD machine
fx-82A, B, C	1985–88	new cases; the C cost-reduced with flexible boards and bare chips
fx-82D	1989	fractions
fx-82L, LB, SOLAR	1990–92	bigger display; hard case; solar power
fx-82 SUPER	1994	faster functions, 10 + 2 digits
fx-82W	1997	two-line display; V.P.A.M.
fx-82TL	1998	S-V.P.A.M.
fx-82MS	2001	more memory, redesigned keys, a statistics mode
fx-82ES	2004	Natural Display, 96 × 31 dots
fx-82ES PLUS	2008	improved ES
fx-82EX ClassWiz	2015	192 × 63 dots
fx-82MS II, fx-82ES PLUS II	2021, 2023	updates of the older lines
fx-82CW	2020s	second-generation ClassWiz

V.P.A.M., Casio’s “Visually Perfect Algebraic Method”, is its name for entering an expression the way it is written and seeing it on the display before pressing =; it came to Casio’s Japanese models in 1994 and to the fx-82 with the fx-82W. The ES series of 2004 took it a step further with Natural V.P.A.M., the Natural Display.

Figure 3 — The first Casio fx-82 of 1982, an LCD scientific in a hard wallet case. — Photo: Joost J. Bakker, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

Figure 4 — The Casio fx-82D of 1989, which added fractions. — Photo: Joost J. Bakker, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

Figure 5 — The Casio fx-82MS of 2001, the last fx-82 before Natural Display: two lines, the expression above and the result below. — Photo: Hazem92, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

3.3 Natural Display

Casio’s own chronology lists “2004: fx-82ES” with a “natural display” that shows fractions and square roots “as they appear in printed materials”. Casio’s brochure for the series called it “Natural Expression Input Display” and “Natural Expression Result Display”: a fraction is typed with a fraction template, its numerator above its denominator; a root sign stretches over what is under it; a power sits raised. The fx-82ES was the first calculator to do it, on a 96 × 31 dot display that can hold two lines of ordinary text or one stacked expression. The same year came the rest of the ES family, the fx-83ES, 85ES, 300ES, 350ES, 115ES, 570ES and 991ES among them, all built round the same chip and firmware.

Figure 6 — A Casio fx-82ES like mine, with "Natural Display" printed above the screen. — Photo: Yellowye, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Figure 7 — The fx-82ES PLUS of 2008, the improved ES, in a Chinese-market version. — Photo: 神樂坂秀吉, Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

Figure 8 — The Casio fx-115ES, the ES family's top American model, which American engineering exams allow. — Photo: Loadmaster (David R. Tribble), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

3.4 ClassWiz

In 2014 and 2015 Casio replaced the ES series with the ClassWiz (EX) series, with a display of 192 × 63 dots, four times the resolution, a QR-code function for viewing results on a phone, and a spreadsheet on the top model. The second-generation ClassWiz CW of late 2022 has a four-level greyscale display. Casio says it has sold 1.8 billion calculators of all kinds in sixty years; one market estimate puts its scientific sales at 13 to 23 million a year.

Figure 9 — The Casio fx-991EX ClassWiz of 2015, with a 192 × 63 dot display. — Photo: IOS 128256384512, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Figure 10 — The Casio fx-991CW, the second-generation ClassWiz of 2022. — Photo: AST14, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

3.5 The TI-30 line to the TI-36X Pro

Texas Instruments kept the TI-30 name through every change of technology:

Table 2 — Texas Instruments kept the TI-30 name through every change of technology

Model	Year	Notes
TI-30	1976	LED, 9 V battery, about $25
TI-30 LCD	1978	Europe only
TI-30 II, SLR, III	1981–84	LCD; the SLR not yet solar
TI-30 Galaxy	mid-1980s	a landscape case
TI-30 SLR+	1987	solar
TI-30X, TI-30Xa	1993–94	10 digits
TI-30X IIS	1998–99	two-line display, a cursor pad
TI-30XS MultiView	2005–07	TI’s first non-graphing dot-matrix screen, four lines
TI-30X Pro MultiView	2010	Europe; withdrawn for wrong answers, relaunched 2011
TI-36X Pro	2011	the American and international version, $25
TI-30X Pro MathPrint	2018	successor, with a sharper display

Alongside ran the TI-36 family, which began in 1986 as a solar TI-35 PLUS and became the TI-36X Solar in the 1990s, an engineering calculator without a dot-matrix screen. The TI-36X Pro carries the name on.

TI calls its textbook display MathPrint, on a screen it calls MultiView, which shows several earlier calculations above the current one. The TI-36X Pro has a mode switch between MathPrint and the older one-line Classic display, and the two even evaluate stacked powers differently, as the operating volume shows.

Figure 11 — The TI-30 Galaxy of the 1980s, the TI-30 in a landscape case. — Photo: Anonimski, Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

Figure 12 — The TI-30X IIS of 1998–99, with a two-line display. — Photo: Peter Frank, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Figure 13 — The TI-36X Solar of 1993, the engineering scientific that the TI-36X Pro replaced. — Photo: Rsn4ke, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Figure 14 — The TI-30XS MultiView, TI's first non-graphing calculator with a dot-matrix display, showing four lines of calculation. — Photo: Vogler, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Figure 15 — A TI-36X Pro of 2011, showing results in MathPrint. — Photo: JoeJohnson2, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

3.6 The withdrawn calculator

The TI-36X Pro’s European twin had an awkward start. TI launched the TI-30X Pro MultiView in September 2010 and withdrew it in October for giving wrong results; it came back in May 2011, the same month the TI-36X Pro was announced in America. The relaunched calculator had a smaller bug of its own: some mixed numbers involving π displayed wrongly. Calculator bugs are an old story at TI too: the TI-30X of 1993 introduced a logarithm bug that was not fixed in the TI-30Xa until 2015.

Figure 16 — A logarithm bug on a TI-30X IIS, the natural logarithm of a number just above 1 giving a wrong result, photographed beside a TI-30 ECO RS. — Photo: Keimzelle, Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

3.7 Hewlett-Packard and Sharp

Hewlett-Packard stayed with reverse Polish notation and with engineers. The HP-15C of 1982 ($135), a landscape programmable scientific with complex numbers and matrices, became a cult machine; HP reissued it as a Limited Edition in 2011 and a Collector’s Edition in 2023. The HP 35s of July 2007, $59.99, marked the HP-35’s 35th anniversary and offers both RPN and algebraic entry.

Sharp’s answer to Natural Display and MathPrint is WriteView, used on its EL-W models by 2010, such as the four-line EL-W516.

Figure 17 — The HP-15C of 1982, Hewlett-Packard's programmable RPN scientific, reissued in 2011 and 2023. — Photo: Pittigrilli, Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

Figure 18 — The HP 35s of 2007, made for the HP-35's 35th anniversary, with RPN and algebraic entry. — Photo: Wdwd, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Sources

Wikipedia, “Casio fx-82 series”, “Casio V.P.A.M. calculators”, “TI-30”, “TI-36”, “HP-15C”, “HP 35s”, “Solar-powered calculator”; Casio’s corporate chronology and its ES-series brochure of 2005; Sharp’s company history (EL-805).
TI’s press release of 16 May 2011 on the TI-36X Pro; TI-Planet and Omnimaga on the TI-30X Pro MultiView’s withdrawal.
Casio guides in the Library: fx-82MS, fx-82ES, fx-115ES and fx-991ES, fx-570ES PLUS and fx-991ES PLUS, fx-570EX and fx-991EX ClassWiz.
TI guides in the Library: TI-36X Pro, TI-30X Pro MultiView, TI-30XS MultiView, TI-30X IIS, TI-36X Solar, and the 1980s TI-30-II, TI-30 SLR and TI-55 manuals.