As a prank to one of my friends, I decided to take up all of his TI-84 Plus's RAM.
At first I tried making a bunch of programs, but that didn't work efficiently. But after a few minutes of thinking, I remembered about matrixes! So I created a massive 51x52 matrix, this dropped his RAM down to ~200 bytes of RAM left. I then just made a program that had just a bunch of random commands to take up the rest of his RAM. It was a funny prank, he couldn't figure out why he couldn't even make a character appear on the screen!

After my friends and I had a good laugh, I deleted the matrix and sent his calculator on it's merry way. But then that got me thinking, what happens when you fill up the Archive space as well? The next day I permanently borrowed (not really) my other friends calculator and archived a bunch of the large matrixes. I'll spare you the details, but it wasn't easy. However, I was able to get the RAM back down to 0 bytes and the Archive down to 11 bytes. Suddenly, some random code appeared on the screen right before it the calculator crashed (just a RAM clear) and I don't understand why. (I had already backed up his programs so they were safe)



Anyways, I deleted all the space-eaters and both calculators are working perfectly fine, I just wanted to share this since it was amusing when I did it.

Have you tried to bring your RAM down to zero? If so, did your calculator do anything weird?

EDIT: Now I have an actual question, so I tried this on the TI-83 Plus and the TI-84 Plus CE and it didn't work on either of those. I easily filled up the 83's memory so it had 0 bytes of RAM, but it still didn't work! Then I tried the CE, but it refused to make a matrix any larger than 20x20! So my question is, why? Why does this only work on the 84 Plus, why does the 83 still work with no RAM, and why wont the CE make a matrix larger than 20x20?

I've tried doing something that was supposed to look similar to the "effective power" bug on the iPhone, with a similar trigger. Basically, get the calculator down to 2 bytes of RAM (iirc), and then RCL a string with a 2-byte character. It then recalls an infinite garbage string, and the only way to get it to stop is to pull the batteries.

I don't remember the details, but years ago I had a TI-86 that got very low on RAM and somehow ended up getting stuck in an infinite “Out of Memory” error loop. Both the “goto” and “quit” options just brought up the same error again and again, and the only way out was to reset, I think.

The TI-89 can have a funky-looking UI from being low on RAM, because dynamic RAM is allocated for all the menus and GUI elements and such. Menus can go missing (and not even work), dialog buttons end up being rendered as bare text strings, almost everything you do pops up the “Memory” error, etc. Funny enough, even with 0 bytes of RAM available, it's still possible to type in commands on the Home screen (but not execute them). Luckily, though the VAR-LINK screen barely works, it still appears possible to delete variables with Backspace to free enough RAM to get things back to normal.