Ruddy-faced maths spod

Dallas - the home of cowboys, oil wells and early integrated circuits as produced by Texas Instruments. Originally founded in seismography (to wheedle out those reticent little underground reservoirs of oil), TI moved into electronics in the ‘50s. A couple of decades later, the Speak And Spell was born (and the rest is history), though it was preceded by it’s less talkative cousin, the Little Professor.

Essentially a rebranding of the company’s TI-1000 calculator¹ with a bit more hoo-hah going on around the semiconductors, the Little Professor boasted the features of an owlish caricature boffin (thus informing an entire generation of kids what to expect from scientists, maths whizzes and academics); sporting a bushy tache, glasses and mortar board look that sat well with Bash Street teachers and graduating students the world over. Little Professor was that most bizarre of maths “learning aids”², an uncalculator – its object, to teach you to do addition, division, etc. in your head. And that’s fun how exactly?

In any case, TI should’ve found themselves in trouble with the International Committee for Children’s Toy Colour Codes (the TW3C), if it wasn’t actually just something we made up, as Little Professor’s basic yellow colour scheme didn’t conform to the recognised TI arithmetic blue of Speak & Maths. But then, Playskool went and screwed that up anyway – using yellow and orange for their speccy show-off “computer friend” Maximus and blue for Major Morgan The Electronic Organ. Music? Blue? What shape of insanity is this?

Where TV numbers supremo Johnny Ball had showed us how to learn maths by stealth (always disguising anything of educative value in a joke, sketch or trick), Li’l Prof did nothing but set sums of increasingly improbable complexity. Get an answer wrong and you would be greeted by the red LED message “EEE”. Which is just odd. By the time the slimline version arrived³, we’d moved on to actual computers. Little Professor, it has to be said, remained sadly no more than the sum of its parts.