College Board issues aside, I have fond memories of TI-BASIC, writing in it a 3D graphing engine and a stock market analyzer. With enough patience, I could make anything ... but friends. (Although with my chatterbot experiments, I certainly tried.)
There has been a stunning amount of progress in pretty much any measurable dimension of technology since 1996. We laugh at our prior naivete, pointing out that what would be a non-functionally awful computer now was considered state of the art at that time. Likewise with a Palm Pilot, arguably a precursor to today's omnipresent smartphones. Texas Instrument (TI) calculators, however, appear to have been left behind, not having made any significant advances (or price drops) since the newly discovered issues of the US computer magazine Computer Shopper were published. Thus, while we groan at how awful our state of the art technologies truly were in 1996, we are reminded that some technologies have remained in relative stasis over the years.
The title text mentions College Board, the organization that runs the SAT and AP tests. It alludes to the fact that College Board's practice of only allowing (or requiring) specific models is at the root of how TI can charge high prices for stagnant technology, although these days they allow numerous models including the (previously) open-source Numworks calculator.
The title text then reminds us that when they were new, TI calculators were relatively powerful tools if you knew how to use them. TI-Basic was a fairly versatile programming language that could be used to make anything from games to reference files to computational programs.
The second half of the title text is a reminder to those of us who felt like gods for knowing how to program that power comes at a price—in this case, the power to program a calculator costs friends. Since, as of this comic's publication date, no program yet devised had truly passed a Turing test, even the most sophisticated Chatterbot (program designed to mimic conversation) couldn't quite qualify as a friend. As of Febuary, 2022, however, a study by a professor in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences published a paper demonstrating that Open AI's ChatGPT could in fact pass the Turing test. This proves ChatGPT could act as a "friend" to users as Randal seems to wish was possible on TI-Basic. Furthermore, a 2024 youtube video adds ChatGPT functionality to a TI calculator, albeit with some hardware modifications to connect to the internet.
Being unable to "make" friends was also later mentioned in 866: Compass and Straightedge.
While many people aren't aware of them, TI does make more modern calculators in their TI-Nspire series, although they were introduced after this comic was published. The newest versions have color screens and (finally!) non-BASIC programming support through Lua and Python. However, most K-12 schools in the US still use the TI-84 calculator series, which is based off the calculator shown in the comic. (Although it also supports Python and has color screens on the higher end models.)