Gossamer Web Browser Runs On Your Graphing Calculator

Monday, July 25th, 2011

Biggs is the editor of TechCrunch Gadgets. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at john@techcrunch.com. → Learn More

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I had a friend who once amazed me by writing a basketball game for the TI-81 graphing calculator. This, however, is an order of magnitude more impressive. Gossamer is a web browser for the TI-83+ through TI-84+SE calculators and, through the use of a number of fairly interesting network protocol APIs, it lets you see the text of almost any website right on the calculators tiny, pixelated screen.

The program’s creator, Christopher “Kerm Martian” Mitchell, is the world’s most prolific graphing calculator programmer and is currently a first-year PhD student at NYU. While I admire his pluck, I worry that he may be shooting a tad low when it comes to the iron he could be programming but, then again, I could barely graph a sine wave on my old TI calc so who am I to judge?

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