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by z_open3 hours ago |

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by nzoschke1 hours ago|

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That’s me with a TI-85 in 7th grade in ‘95 or so.

It was effectively a portable computer that I was allowed to use and play with in most classes.

Started with TI-BASIC, then discovered ticalc.org and the shell and assembly programming hacks, games, and home brew transfer cables.

It effectively started my electrical engineering and computer science career.

I know I’m not alone.

by freedomben27 minutes ago|

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Indeed, +1. I was the same though with a TI-83 instead. I had to get good at hiding the calculator under the desk in non-math classes because the English teacher (for example) would press me on "why do you need a calculator for English class?"

I'm kicking myself for not saving the game code I wrote for some of those early games. They weren't very good, but I'd love to see the code, despite the horrifying spaghetti that it was.

by aklein1 hours ago|

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Same here! TI-85, and then HP48G series after that!

by butlike35 minutes ago|

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Absolutely! It started with MENU() text adventure games and then got to drawing custom UIs with DRAW(). iirc, you could get small text by using TEXT() in the DRAW() command. The specifics might be wrong on that one though!

by freedomben30 minutes ago|

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And many of the people I knew who went on to become real incredible software devs got tired of the limitations of basic and went to ASM. My friend and I started building (and selling) graphlink cables made from old printer parallel cables, mainly for the ASM hackers. We even sold them with a warranty!

by matt_kantor34 minutes ago|

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That was me. Algebra clicked for me so I found the pace of the class to be slow. Ended up creating a few programs to solve tedious things like the quadratic formula incrementally while displaying the intermediate steps so I could write them down on tests.

Authoring programs using the buttons on the calculator was not fun.

by NanoWar27 minutes ago|

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It was OK, just needed to memorize the commands, they are all reachable via a combination of number keys :-)

by ttoinou1 hours ago|

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Wait, I'm not the only one ? :P . I was def the only one in my class and maybe we were 3 of all classes doing that

by joebates43 minutes ago|

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Same. I even convinced my mom to buy me a transfer cable so I could distribute my programs to my classmates. I was the "plug" for a brief time. Probably my closest taste of being "popular". It was nice.

by freedomben25 minutes ago|

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I ended up building my own by "repurposing" and old printer parallel cable that my dad wasn't using. He wasn't thrilled about that, but seemed a little bit proud at what I did with it.

I eventually made enough money from "donations" from people to buy a proper cable, which did improve my DX quite a bit. The hacked up parallel cable wasn't the most reliable...