A web browser for your calculator

Jacob Aron, technology reporter

Smart phones, tablets, televisions and of course, the trusty old PC - these days you've got a lot of options when choosing how to access the web. Now there's a new option: the graphics calculator. 

Gossamer is a web browser for Texas Instruments calculators created by Christopher Mitchell, a computer scientist at New York University. Websites are formatted and sent to the calculator by an external server. At the moment the browser can only access sites on a pre-defined list, but Mitchell is working on a new version that will let users input any URL.

As you might expect, the retro-browser isn't Mitchell's first venture into programming graphics calculators. He claims on his website to be the "world's most prolific graphing calculator programmer". He very well may be: He previously developed networking software that allows calculators to connect to other devices, an essential pre-requisite to a web browser, along with other programs including a media player and video games.