Same for me, it was also my first time ever seeing code, and I still remember it well. While getting ready for swim practice in a locker room, my friend challenged me to beat his score on a button mashing game he programmed earlier that day in school on his TI-84. My 12 year old self was in awe of his BASIC skills.

Same.

I bounced off a python 2 tutorial and a C tutorial, but some random nobody's TI-BASIC tutorial that started really damn easy is how I became a Computer Scientist.

I eventually figured out python too!

I made my own game and got a little notoriety around the school for it.

This new one has python, imagine

same. My first real exposure to coding was hacking Drug Wars on my brothers old ti-89 in math class.

I programmed a Mandelbrot generator on my TI-81 (if I remember the model correctly) when I should have been paying attention in class. Entering the code was slow and painful - fortunately the algorithm is fairly simple. The batteries lasted forever, until one day I set the bailout to a ridiculously high value, given the limited resolution, and walked away.

Current smartphones are highly optimized for content consumption a.k.a doom scrolling. Nothing serious exists for programming. On top of that, a touch keyboard and hard to reach special characters make programming on a modern smartphone a big chore. I miss the old days of smartphones that had a hardware keyboard with tactile feedback. I used to code up and maintain a PHP based dynamic website circa 2007 with a Sony Ericsson K770i and upload through a J2ME based FTP client that also had the text editor in it. If I remember it correctly it was called MobyExplorer

What's your favorite free programming environment for commonly used smartphones?

  pkg install python
  python
  print('hello')
  ctrl+D

Yeah I guess I should correct and say that I do use an HP 50G emulator on my iPhone cuz I like RPN.

But even still, the iPhone can do many things and is many times more capable, and you can buy a used iPhone 12 that works fine for about the same price as one of these calculators.

My buddy was a general contractor. They have books of pre-printed calculators for common beam lengths. For instance, say you have a room 30 feet wide and you're putting a roof on it with a 30 degree pitch. The book will tell you exactly how long to cut the roof timbers so that they reach from the edge of the wall to the crest of the roof.

Said friend was at a site and someone had misplaced the book. He pulled out a calculator and did some basic trig to give them the lengths and told them to get back to work. He said they were looking at him like he'd just conjured a demon or something. "You can... just calculate that?" "How did you think they made the book?" "But how'd you learn to do that?" "In that math class you dropped in high school."

Wow, there were actually principles behind the rules and they bothered to reason about them. That's way different than my experience with school teachers.

Ha in my school's math department the cheating thesis won and my silly single variable CAS system (which in retrospect did nothing you couldn't do with the graph functions!) got calculator programs banned. Luckily enough my specific math teacher that year didn't care enough to enforce it and it was soon forgotten

It's a weird halfway house.

I had a cheap Casio fx calculator. It got me all the way through my exams in school and university. I had Mathematica at home.

While I can see that being very good on a TI-84 would help you complete exams faster and get better marks, is that a skill that we want students to learn? Being good on a fancy calculator is essentially useless in real life. In real life people use computers not fancy calculators.

IMO it's better to either allow only basic calculators, or to allow real mathematics software.

That was my first graphing calculator in high school, because it was way cheaper than the equivalent TI. Like seriously 1/4 the price for "beginning of the school year" sales.

That thing was fine, and if I hadn't dropped it and broken it, I probably would have kept using it for the rest of high school. I eventually replaced it with an HP.

Back in the mid-90's we had a TI version of sneakernet where you would copy programs from one student on to your TI-85 via a link cable; this is how I got Tetris back in the day. I assume OP did the same.

(Edit: I am assuming you were asking how it's possible I didn't use it, not how it's possible that people were copying programs onto their calculators.)

I don't know. It's been too long. We must have done graphing on paper.

I don't remember a lot of coursework in math that required me to produce a decimal value. For example, we wanted √2 instead of 1.414.

In physics, I think we used regular calculators.

I used to be bewildered at my parents not remembering certain things from high school. But, now I'm living it :).

Same except mine was over 30 years ago (an OG TI-85). Still on my desk, still use it almost every day for something or other.

$100 for something you'll use all through middle and high school and into college isn't a bad deal.