I received the TI-83+ manual on the first day of high school and read it back-to-back that same day.

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.

It's funny how many software developers got into it due to being bored in class with a TI-83 and randomly trying to create programs.

That brings back memories...

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...

I hope / don't hope to be famous enough one day that people start looking through my blog and forum posts from when I was a teenager. :|

Ilya S?

From https://youtu.be/SlGRN8jh2RI?si=osz3-ssDO7dnvKD-&t=103

There‘s HP calculator guys and TI guys. Around the age of 17 I spent lots of time programming my HP28s calculator in a Forth like language that had symbolic mathematics, lots of ideas from Scheme (closures, functions as first class arguments, recursion). It felt like magic dealing with concepts I hadn’t seen in the C compiler on my Amiga or later in Turbo Pascal. But I saw these concepts later in Mathematica and was familiar.

I had programmed games, complex 3d visualisations (super slow but oh well), and was totally fascinated by what this device could do.

The original manual for the TI83+ is what actually got me into programming. It was pretty nice.