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Rendered at 15:06:36 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I had programmed games, complex 3d visualisations (super slow but oh well), and was totally fascinated by what this device could do.
Subsequent math classes, I started by writing a BASIC problem to solve the type of math problem we were given.
I can't decide if I got really good at solving those math problems by solving them generally once, or really bad at solving those math problems for never having solved them more than once or twice by hand while writing the program.
Those programs were very inefficient, and you could code the TI-83+ in assembly, but it required uploading the code via cable. I recall being able to play small internet-downloadable network games with two TI-83+ connected. I never got around to writing any games myself.
In 2008 I was in high school and wrote a TI-BASIC tutorial in German [0] on my blog that became by far the most popular thing I wrote - maybe on par with my post about how to fix a quest bug in Skyrim by teleporting Delphine.
I was a bit mad back then that people for some reason appreciated those posts more than many very deep teenager ramblings about politics/philosophy :D
[0]: https://archive.haukeluebbers.de/2008/12/ti-basic-tutorial-1...
No sane Basic should leak stack memory just because you exited an "If-Then" block without reaching the corresponding "End". Yes that's a thing. If you use "If-Then" and the code never reaches the "End" because you used "Goto" to leave the block, a few bytes are leaked every time that happens, and eventually the program stops with "ERR: Memory". You needed to use "If" then "Goto" on the immediate next line, and that would avoid the leak. Exiting the program or stopping it will give you back all the leaked memory, including seeing that error.
Then you have the lack of actual subroutines or functions. All you can do is call into a separate program, and return things by putting them in specific variables. But the Basic doesn't even have "Gosub".
Also, it's very very slow.
See subsection 2.1 in https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/145/14542.htm...
(I should add that the first image on that page shows one neat effect of non-lexicality: you can put an "Else" statement as the body of an "If", so that it's skipped when the "If"'s condition is false.)
For me the bad part is that the official TI-83 manual has a code example for the GETKEY function that is using GOTO to jump out of a loop.
In normal programming languages, If-Then-Else is made up of a conditional branch to get you into either the "If" part or the "else" part, and a jump to skip you past the "else" part to the "end if" part. There is no stack used for that.
I wonder if I still have my minesweeper program on my old calculators.
The functions feature allow you to define and graph equations with x and y. Well other variables also factor in including program defined variables such as z. That enables 3d orthographic graphs to be drawn.
Then I took it a step further and translated the results into a matrix and used that data to make real 3d projections of my graphs (or other shapes)
A bit serendipitous as my father just gave me back the calculator I used, I will be passing that down to my kids.
-- William Gibson, Neuromancer
I just love opening a page, and it is not vomited with claude's aesthetics.
So i wrote a program that just made it look like I cleared memory and it worked like a charm.
I don't remember if I even stored anything that could be constituted cheating but it was more about the satisfaction of knowing I outsmarted them, heh.
My school recommended the 83+ but I ended up with an 85, probably because it was on sale or something. This meant I couldn't share games that all the kids had in their 83 so I got my start by copying them by hand and trying to figure out the syntax differences by guessing. After one of those I was able to start making my cheater programs and aced geometry because of it.
Fondest memories were recreating my school C++ project in TI BASIC and showing it to my teacher, using utilities to restore apps and data after a "reset" in math class so I could skip over memorizing equations, grayscale erotica, and of course Phoenix.
* A quadratic formula program, which outputs the number of roots and the x-intercepts upon the user inputting the values of A, B, and C.
* A fighting game, with health, a store, different enemies, weapons, armor, etc, with graphics and animation.
I read the whole manual's programming section but couldn't make heads or tails of it. It assumed you knew basic logic/programming and mostly explained functionality/syntax.
Then in 5th grade my friend who was 3 years older was like "hey look I made a story in my calculator" and it was this big choose your own adventure story. He showed me how to use goto, how to display text, and a function for multiple choice user input + goto. I was in business!
I wrote my own story but had a section where I wanted to do different things if you had gotten an item already so I had to program the whole story twice and only enter the second version from the option where you get the item. I tried writing a more complicated story with more items but the duplication was insane 3 items required 3!=6 copies of common locations. I was like "this is dumb there's got to be a better way" and I looked at the manual again and now I had enough of a framework to understand "OH a variable is whether you have the red key, why didn't they just put that?"
Functional Programming in Scala
We could have a quadratic equation solver on tests, but not the other functions. I put a splash screen that said my name and "Quadratic Equation Solver" which prompted a, b, and c if you pressed ENTER. If you pressed the right button on that splash screen (sin, naturally) it would unlock the full menu.
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.
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.
Between this, and SNES emulation (searching memory for values and adjusting things to see how they'd affect the game), I was destined for computer science.
Good times, indeed.
Authoring programs using the buttons on the calculator was not fun.
We had show our calculator had been memory wiped before any tests.
Although in retrospect we only had to show the wipe screen which we probably could have coded up as its own program.
I already knew Basic from a DOS PC, but did write a Breakout clone while bored in classes on my TI-82.
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...