CodeWalrus

So I thought it would be interesting to make a poll asking people when approximately they started programming for calculators, but you can answer even if you never touched a calculator too. I have set the poll by three years chunk so that each period spans a specific TI community era. For example, 1994-96 was when ZShell arrived and when ticalc.org was about to come to birth and back in the days, it seemed like the TI community was split into specific eras anyway (especially after 2008 where it's almost like a new TI community started)

Once you answered the poll, you should reply to this topic with more details, such as the specific year you started calculator programming (if applicable) and the year you started programming in general.


I myself started programming for calculators before other platforms, in 2001 with the TI-83+ and a few months later I started PC programming.

In 2011 I started programming my TI-83+ in BASIC (yes 83+, I didn't get the 84+SE for some bizarre reason), both pure and soon after hybrid. In 2012 I branched out to computer programming, and I discovered Axe. I think I learned z80 assembly in late 2013, but I'm not sure.

2005-2007ish? I don't know. It was VBScript for the sole purpose of making MS Agents act. There wasn't much "real" programming until 2009-2010 probably, when I started trying out Scratch, BYOB, and reading a crap ton of code. I'm actually coding things now, which is nice. I've been attempting since 2012-2013.

I started calc programming around 2005, back in Grade 9 (Sec. 3 for you Québec people, I was 15) when I got my TI-83+ to use for school and, being curious like I am, immediately looked for every option this thing had to offer, and so I learned its BASIC language. Around the same time I discovered Le Site du Zéro (now OpenClassrooms, that website began being too commercial ._.) and started programming in C, and even before I began coding in HTML and Javascript. I remember back then, I had a computer, but I wasn't really allowed Internet for the simple reason we still had 56K (remember we actually had to connect to Internet over the phone line? Pepperidge Farms remembers) and I was allowed like, 10 minutes a month, so all I did is clicking pretty much every file in the file system, every option in every program and the control panel, I really liked this fun game, Microsoft Excel... so of course I did the same with my calc. And everything remotely configurable. So imagine when we first got cable Internet... whoa. I was flabbergasted by the fact I could download a Simple Plan MP3 in less than a minute on KaZaA. I digress, but yeah I was really active in calc programming, to the point I was known at school as the guy who's always on his calc, but somehow still always get 100% scores, my teachers wanted to reprimand me but couldn't have a reason to because I still was so good. Anyway, I knew TICalc.org and sites like that since 2005, but it was only in 2010 when I discovered Omnimaga I began sharing with the community. And my life began a serious downfall became the king of the Internet.

I started in 6th grade for a competition (http://www.tsaweb.org/), which was 3 years ago. (I think.)

Its pretty hard to say when i really started. I did some android tutorials and bukkit plugin stuff experimentation when i was 14-15, adn started doing lua (due to computercraft) when i was 15. Then again, i have a lego NXT brick since i was like 11  so you could count that as programming too...

I started programming for TI calculators in 2012, in seventh grade. I saw a video of brusspup playing games on his 4-function calculator (an obvious hoax), and I wanted to see if you could actually do that kind of thing in real life. Turns out you can, so here I am. The only trouble is, 2012-internet-me was arrogant as hell, and all for doing not-so-amazing things. I'm pretty sure I got banned from at least three forums during that time, one of them being Omnimaga (hey, long live potatoes :P ).

As for programming in general...I'm not sure, but I think I did some amateur Batch and VBScript at one point for pranks. My mom actually believed I was "sending all her stuff to hackers" :P .

As you specified calculator programming, I started quite soon after I got the thing for school halfway into 2013. For programming in general, I started back in early 2011 by typing over maze games from YouTube until I knew what code did what.

I started with some HTML and messing around with misc languages in 6th grade (2012 or so) and then in 7th grade I discovered that you could put games on calculators, which led to programming calcs, which lead to some ruby and C now.

Thanks for answering so far. It's definitively interesting to see how long ago overall our users started programming. And yeah Cumred I think NXT would count as programming. Nxtboy III on Omni made NXT games actually. HTML, on the other hand, would be more a markup language (although maybe HTML5 can be used for programming?). RPG Maker and the like might not count too, but perhaps it could be included in a different poll where we ask when did you start making games?

As for myself this was my programming timeline:

July 2001: TI-BASIC
September 2001: Visual Basic 6
2008: Casio Basic
February 2010: Axe Parser
Late 2013: HP PPL

There were also failed attempts at learning ASM and C, in 2004, 05 and for C in 2008, and I also used RPG Maker in 2007-08 and 2012.

HTML5 is still a markup language. *I may be wrong*, but as far as i understand people refer to the new versions of HTML/JavaScript/CSS together as "HTML 5". So if you make a game in "HTML5" you are still using JavaScript.

Yeah its pretty hard to make any logic in HTML :P

<!--[if !IE]><!--><p>your winner<p><!--<![endif]-->
<!--[if IE]><!--><p>you lost<p><!--<![endif]-->

:P

c4ooo pulling a Big Rigs :P

But yeah I kinda thought that maybe a pure HTML5 game was impossible or something. It would still be cool to see, though.

HTML5 not only refers to the markup language, but also the Javascript APIs lying behind each tag. For example, the drawing functions associated with <canvas>, the playing functions of <video> and <audio>, etc. Some stuff, such as local storage, may not be associated to a tag, but may still be part of the HTML5 standard.

But I take it that users who have javascript disabled then can't use those?

I started calc programming a few months before joining CodeWalrus. Main main activity spike at calc programming was right at the start of CW, but died as I changed school and don't meet with my friend from that school anymore and because graphical calcs are becoming totally obsolete in Germany and aren't used anymore. They are all switching to these crappy scientific ones that I btw managed to stack overflow :P
It's quite nice, when the thing comes down after overwriting RAM with useless equations. I am talking about these non programmable calcs of course.

Hm you should post how you made those scientific calculators stack overflow at some point. I am curious about that :P


It sucks that most of Germany banned graphic calcs from school, though. I hope France, USA and the Netherlands won't do the same in the future, else I bet this will be the end of calculators. I doubt it, though, since in France the 2018 school policy changes will still allow the use of specific graphing models.

Anyway I have been considering making a color remake of Illusiat 1 and 2 for a while, as a First Fantasy game, since it would be quite fitting for Illusiat 15th anniversary.

I started programming in 1983 (I was 10) , on a Thomson TO7, at school. I was so happy to discover BASIC !
(http://www.old-computers.com/museum/photos/thomson_to7_1.jpg)
(see http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=11 for more details)

I was eager to get my own computer, but in these days, a computer was expensive !..At last, 2 years later, my parents offered my brother and I an Amstrad CPC 464 (included a tape recorder, and colour monitor) Such a great day !!!

I still remember back when Windows PCs costed $3000-5000 in Quebec. Around 1992-93 it wasn't that bad and you could easily find them for $1000-2000, but for some reasons prices skyrocketed in the mid 90's before finally nosediving under $500-1500 in the 2000's.

No wonder why so few people over here had a computer back then...

Nowadays, a game console costs $400 and a PC $1000, but back then a console costed $200 and a PC $4000, in average. Considering back then most people accepted school work written on paper and that typewriters were still mainstream, I think for gamers the choice was very easy.


What amazes me, though, with some of those old computers, is how fast BASIC can be compared to TI calculators. I should really give it a try someday if it can be written in a standard code editor rather than inserting commands via command consoles. I would definitively not be able to do high-end games, but it would still be fun to mess around and make retro stuff.

Quote from: grosged on July 12, 2016, 08:09:45 AM
At last, 2 years later, my parents offered my brother and I an Amstrad CPC 464 (included a tape recorder, and colour monitor)

Lucky *******

I just realized C coding started for me when I talked to a Minebuilder-modder ( a clone of Minecraft for android which was better then PM at that time) who was able to code in C on the forum of the game-dev called space-walrus.com! Quite cool that I'm on another walrus forum now, lol! :D

you were 25

Looking back, I doubt I would have gotten much patience to program and test games on a tape-based medium. While I did not mind waiting for Goto scrolling to end in TI-BASIC enough to drive me away from programming, the long wait to load programs into memory from a tape everytime I change something, only to find another bug, would have gotten me mad lol. Even moreso nowadays, now that I don't have patience even for Goto scrolling on some calcs

edit: ew no this post is filled with a middle schoolers ego
edit2: wait i posted this in January? god i must still have middle schoolers ego
[spoiler]I fiddled with C for the first time when I was 9 I think, but dropped it because I got bored of it. Turns out I wasn't actually bored, I was just trash at it. Once I made a calculator app without realizing math operators existed... I used loops with increments and decrements.
So after a while of not doing anything, I picked up Python when I was 10. And then I started learning a ton of other languages and whatever. I started doing calculator programming at about the same time I joined CodeWalrus.[/spoiler]

The first thing I really started programming was the TI-81, which I believe I got around my birthday in 1994. Technically, I had a TI-99/4A computer when I was four or five (would have been somewhere around the mid-late '80s) and sometimes played with the programming examples in the manuals, but I don't count that because I could barely read yet and didn't really know what I was doing. I even had the tape recorder and attachment but couldn't understand what it was for or how to hook it up, so I never got to find out what that was like. Mostly we just played cartridge games on it (we only had three or four; they were hard to find). Then sometime later, that went away and we had an NES instead. Too bad Famicom BASIC never made it to North America. :(

I had a TI-82, then 85, by '96 or so. I got hold of another 99/4A early in '97 but didn't have anything other than Munch Man (no tape attachments or anything else), so I couldn't do much with it. (I was also surprised how slow BASIC on it was; my TI calcs were probably much faster!) Then we got an aunt's old 80386 computer later in '97, I think, and QBasic was awesome compared to anything else I had done. Made a few nifty (to me) programs in it eventually and tried to make a game or two, one of which was playable but never quite finished (I got bored making levels, and my coding skills weren't that great yet so I never managed to get passwords or 2-player mode working). Got a TI-86 in Christmas '98, and messed with it a lot, though I found the slow BASIC execution speed quite limiting.

Early 2000s, I dabbled in TI-86 ASM programming a bit, but not much, since I had an 89 and 68k C looked more enticing. I stuck with that for a while (along with extensive TI-BASIC coding on my TI-89) and eventually gained some familiarity with C that way. This lasted until roughly the mid 2000s, then late 2000s I got an HP 50g (my first HP calc) and got familiar with UserRPL and SysRPL. During this decade I learned better techniques, and my programming and debugging skills improved significantly.

Lately I haven't done a lot of calc programming, though I've been developing some personal tools with Python on my desktop computer. My favorite programming language actually has remained Python for the last 10–15 years. This is what introduced me to object-oriented programming, which I've been using for a while but am still getting better at.

Quote from: Strontium on January 06, 2017, 02:59:16 AM
I fiddled with C for the first time when I was 9 I think, but dropped it because I got bored of it. Turns out I wasn't actually bored, I was just trash at it. Once I made a calculator app without realizing math operators existed... I used loops with increments and decrements.
So after a while of not doing anything, I picked up Python when I was 10. And then I started learning a ton of other languages and whatever. I started doing calculator programming at about the same time I joined CodeWalrus.

I would've loved to see that source code of yours  :thumbsup:

Is it normal you drop one language after another, just to replace it by something rather similar...?  :ninja:

I don't think I posted here, did I?

Anyhow, I started programming the day we got the graphical calcs from school (TI-84+), I was 13 back then.

Well, now I am insane on programming and code almost daily.....heehee