I recently got my hands on the TI-80 VSC, completing my collection of the TI-8x series (though not all variants, just one of each number). Here's the teardown I performed.


ROM 4.0. As usual, we observe ribbon cable degradation. Good thing it doesn't affect the VSC panel output.


April 1995, Revision B. The Revision A VSC remains elusive as of posting.


Side profile, note that the bulkier housing prevents the slide cover from going on the back.


The VSC port.


Opens up like a book. Quite reminiscent of opening an iPhone: one could tear the ribbon cable if they didn't know where it is.


Close-up of the electronics. T6M53A ASIC, as expected.


Display assembly. In the middle, the LCD driver circuit on a thin and delicate boad.


The VSC daughterboard.


VSC board and connector. Rather than pulling the cable straight out, I found it helpful to use a gentle wiggling motion to ease it out.


Reverse side of the VSC board.


Rear housing.


The keypad matrix and LCD.


Front panel.

Personal opinion: Despite the shortcomings of the TI-80 as a budget calculator, the compact design and effort TI put into keeping costs down are quite admirable, especially the choice of a proprietary ASIC. I imagine that the TI-84+CE could learn from the TI-80 with optimized hardware, compact size, and low cost. But I digress.

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/fWpP3KR and https://imgur.com/a/RKmZvHi
Ideally, these would be a bit less grainy as it is my first real experience with the DSLR camera.

Photos with the VSC panel when I get some more downtime. Kind of comical watching the whole setup being powered off two coin cells, if one so desires.

And the Ti-Graph Link software for the TI-80: https://tiplanet.org/forum/archives_voir.php?id=2786234
It comes on a 720k floppy and only does screenshots.

Thanks for taking the time to do this, looks like there is a bit of flux residue around the viewscreen port and I/O jack which I don't think I've seen on other TI-80s
Interestingly, this is the first time I've seen a viewscreen TI-80 with APLMB 30F 2-2 but I have a non-viewscreen unit with that same board (of course, the comm and viewscreen circuits aren't populated).
Zeroko noticed a while back that the linking code changed slightly from 3.0 to 4.0 so its possible that there are no 3.0 ViewScreens because of a bug which would have been fixed in 4.0.
I've went ahead and added this as a variation in the gsheet since it is the same board but with some extra components.
Another interesting thing is that the serial number begins with 05 but the date code is 0495. We've known for a long time that the first digits of the serial didn't quite match up with the date codes but they were strongly correlated, particularly on early models like the TI-81, TI-82, TI-85 and TI-80. This is the first time I've seen them not line up on a TI-80 but I guess the serial is 132 so it would have been made right in between 0495 and 0595 so some discrepancy isn't really surprsing.