It may not be strictly necessary, but it's a great educational and exploratory toy.
The main draw for me was unsupervised exploration. The calculator is simple enough that you can figure out how to program yourself (with the manual), and you can know 'everything' there is to know about it. You don't have to ask a teacher for anything, you get to do whatever interests you, and show your friends. That makes it more exciting somehow.
Like the author of the article, I (and my friends) spent a lot of time programming in BASIC on it. I also feel I spent a lot of time simply plotting functions, just to see how they behaved. EG, looking at the 'beats' produced by adding up sine functions. As a scientist today I frequently do that kind of exploratory analysis, but in python or mathematica.
The main draw for me was unsupervised exploration. The calculator is simple enough that you can figure out how to program yourself (with the manual), and you can know 'everything' there is to know about it. You don't have to ask a teacher for anything, you get to do whatever interests you, and show your friends. That makes it more exciting somehow.
Like the author of the article, I (and my friends) spent a lot of time programming in BASIC on it. I also feel I spent a lot of time simply plotting functions, just to see how they behaved. EG, looking at the 'beats' produced by adding up sine functions. As a scientist today I frequently do that kind of exploratory analysis, but in python or mathematica.