[clamprecht]

My TI-85 story. While I was in prison, around 1996 or 1997, I found out a friend had a TI-85 calculator. I realized it was programmable, so I borrowed it over the weekend and wrote a program to track his stock portfolio. It was the first time I had programmed anything in 2 or 3 years.

Then I learned that the US Bureau of Prisons had a rule against any calculator (or device) that was "programmable". So I programmed the TI-85 so its startup screen read, "TI-85 NON-PROGRAMMABLE CALCULATOR". Problem solved.

[pizzafeelsright]

You're a hero of mine so here is my story.

Me in math class in 1996 - I had a TI-82 things are programmable so I have no formal education, my parents are illiterate, and taught myself to program, and I begged them to buy me one.

I spent time learning how to code on it, writing from scratch, the game Spyhunter.

I couldn't figure out how to draw with lines or pixels so I used ASCII or text.

I presented this to my teacher who told me "these aren't for games". I was crushed.

[MrBuddyCasino]

Seems like everyone has such a story about a teacher. „No you can’t read more advanced books because the current ones bore you“ etc etc

What is the matter with these people.

[abustamam]

Makes me realize how lucky I was to have teachers who pushed me to actually excel in areas I was gifted in (and also pull me back in areas I was not gifted in :))

When I was in 7th grade I was getting 100% on all my math exams so my teacher had me test into 8th grade math (algebra). Then when I was a sophomore I was supposed to take precalc but my teacher thought I obviously didn't belong there either so she put me in her Calc AB class, which was the highest math class my school offered, but had me self-study for the Calc BC AP test during class time, taking her own time to sit down with me whenever I had questions.

A couple years later I TA'd for her precalc class and I spent most of my time in that class playing with my TI 8x (can't remember the exact model, maybe 84?) and programming very basic games on it. I showed her what I made and she was so impressed she said I should study computer science.

Guess what I did? Not that. I studied something completely different in college but now I've been a programmer for ten years and wonder why I ever doubted her at all.

Just goes to show how much impact a good teacher has on a student's life.

[bloomingeek]

Some teachers, like many of us, have caveman emotions, live under near medieval systems and have access to god-like tech. (My version of a quote I read earlier this year.)

What could go wrong?

[ta988]

rigidity

[3form]

Personally betting on the "crab bucket" mentality.

[threethirtytwo]

It's typical. They're supposed have authority and be better than you. That is the purpose of their position and their identity.

Don't be so quick to judge, because most people, including you would react the same way in similar contexts, for example if you were the top engineer at a company and someone started showing you up and being a hundred times better than you.

[ndriscoll]

Not really? I've worked with people who were super productive with high quality work, and my reaction was to... gravitate toward working more with them. Some people are status driven. Some are not. Some are apparently pathologically status driven such that they'll compete with a literal child.

In any case refusing to nurture such a child (even in effectively passive ways like letting them quietly do something more advanced with no specific instruction) and not being reprimanded for it would reveal that the actual purpose of their position is daycare worker, which should be a bigger strike to the ego.

[threethirtytwo]

That’s what all people say. Everyone who is status driven will not admit or even realize they are status driven. But the fact of the matter is… it is human nature to be status driven. Everyone recognizes status symbols and possesses such a drive within them. It is also clinically tied with serotonin levels and observed in cross species behavior. To say you have no drive for status is an either a lie or delusional. The evidence is so ingrained in science.

Now. That being said, the drive can be suppressed. But suppressing the drive doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist and that you don’t feel it. Also many people feel the drive at different levels of intensity that much is true.

Anecdotally your response to me indicates to me that you have not suppressed status seeking drives completely. The key hints are you’re referring to how you’re drawn to people who do high quality work. That is orthogonal to status seeking. Your status and identity is tied to a certain type of work you do and you take pride in. Have you worked with anyone who was so powerful that their work invalidated, crushed and basically humiliated anything you did. And let’s say this person is not malicious. He’s just so much better than you that your work and identity is inconsequential and eclipsed by his work.

If you said that you wouldn’t feel anything in the face of that then I would say that you truly do not seek status. I would also say you’re not human.

That being said a teacher holds his identity as someone who is better than children. He needs to be better than children in order to transfer his betterment (aka knowledge) to children. His role in society and identity rests on that foundation. If children are better then him and know more than him then that is inadvertently an attack on his identity. His reaction is natural and expected. It’s not that he has anything against the child, it’s self protection mechanisms to protect his identity via deluding himself. Very typical.

You see much of the same stuff with LLMs and programmers. A huge portion of HN was in denial for the longest time about the capabilities of LLMs calling these things stochastic parrots and thinking it’s impossible for the AI to take over. HN was just completely wrong about that and they were also wrong about driverless cars. The reason why they were so wrong is not because they’re making a logical and rational prediction… no they are choosing the prediction that most aligns with protecting their identity and skill set as programmers which is in the process of being replaced by agentic ai.

[ndriscoll]

Again, I think you're entirely off base here. Maybe you are status driven enough that you can't wrap your head around someone who isn't, but I'm really just not interested in it. I want to give my family a comfortable life and spend time with them. That's it.

To color that a little, I've literally told the last 4 managers I've had very explicitly that I'm not at all interested in career advancement. When I was asked to lead my current team, I said "I've done it in the past and can if you want, but check with A and B first to see if they want to". I literally do not care about it. Work is a means to provide, and it does well enough that I don't need to chase it anymore. Actually the marginal pay for the increased responsibility kind of doesn't make it worth it, but like I said I'll do it if they need that. And so my focus is generally thinking about "how do I get one of my team members in a place where they can replace me?"

If we're talking about who's more human, I'd put forward that caring about who's best seems less humanizing than seeking to spend time with people you care about, remembering how lucky you are to have that time, and ignoring outside noise.

Especially when it comes to teaching, if your identity is "better than child" instead of "person who helps children reach their potential" I'm not sure what to say. Sounds like a narcissist.

On LLMs, I found them to be useless but interesting right up until December, at which point I started a hard push for my team to adopt it (and get excited about it). I'm very explicit that my mental framing with them is "how do I get it to do my job". I'm well aware that "programmer" per se is not going to be a job in the future. That much seemed obvious as far back as the original chatgpt release. That's fine, and just means we have to ask ourselves what else needs doing. If we ever get to the point where the answer is "nothing" then I guess we're all doing pretty well.

[throw10000]

> That’s what all people say. Everyone who is status driven will not admit or even realize they are status driven. But the fact of the matter is… it is human nature to be status driven. Everyone recognizes status symbols and possesses such a drive within them. It is also clinically tied with serotonin levels and observed in cross species behavior. To say you have no drive for status is an either a lie or delusional. The evidence is so ingrained in science.

Isn't that just a kafkatrap?

Consider the following exchange where a sane man finds himself in a psychiatric ward:

John: I'm telling you, I'm sane. I don't have any delusions of grandeur and I don't think that I'm Jesus.

Evaluator: I see, your subconscious delusion and erroneous insistence upon sanity are more pervasive than I thought. Your repeated attempts to assert that you're not Jesus is clearly a defense mechanism. I'm afraid I cannot recommend your release.

Something went wrong here.

Or to rephrase: suppose that a person existed who was not status driven. Would you be able to detect such a person if they existed?

[clamprecht]

The fact that you made a game on a device that "wasn't for games" is even cooler.

[a96]

The essence of hack.

[anthk]

You can write a game in almost every language. Check these ones written even on really low specs VM's:

https://codeberg.org/luxferre/mu808

This could be adapted https://codeberg.org/luxferre/scoundrel-ports

More info at https://luxferre.top

[noworld]

One time I wrote a game in English.

[anthk]

With Inform7 targeting the ZMachine VM you can literally say that =).

Inform6 it's a 'small' OOP language where with the English library the syntax it's dumber than VB6, Lua or anything else. Basically the objects and logic describe themselves as a dumbed down config file. You create a meta-object for rooms and light, and then copy and paste to create rooms, containers and tools based on atributes (again as if it were a simple config file).

Inform6 example:

https://jxself.org/git/?p=cloak-of-darkness.git;a=blob_plain...

Inform6 compiler:

https://jxself.org/git/inform.git

(cc -o inform src/* )

Inform6 lib

https://jxself.org/git/informlib.git

To compile Cloak...

       inform +lib  cloak-of-darkness.inf

Lib should be the English library, you can get it with

      git submodule update --init --recursive 

or copy informlib to lib/

To play the game:

       frotz cloak-of-darkness.z5

Or LectRote under Mac... or WinFrotz under Windows, it will work the same.

With Inform7 you just write clauses in English, the interpreter will write IF6 code for you and then call the inform6 compiler to create a Z5-8 game ready to run.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform#Inform_7

As you can see, no AI needed, no LLM's, no huge GB sized software, just a Pentium MMX could be enough for i7, a 8-16 bit machine for Puny Inform games (kinda like Inform6 'lite'), a 16 bit machine for z3-z5 games and maybe a 'high end' 16 bit computer for Z8 games. A 386 PC would be enough to run 'complex' text adventures. And consistent enough unlike LLM's where the objects' enviroment is lost everytime.

[mlry]

Irony is lost on this guy ... :D Edited to add: I comment on the guy you commented on, not you. Just in case. I did not want to reply to them to not give offense.

[mal10c]

I have an almost identical story. I wrote a few games: snake and a choose your own adventure fantasy thing. And likely others that I can't remember, but yeah, I had a teacher tell me basically the same thing. I was pretty sad because those really took a lot of time.

[andai]

I relay to you a nugget from my ancestor: "Man, this teacher sounds like a real shithead!"

[clamprecht]

In high school our computer class was in BASIC. They taught us to swap two variables A & B like this:

  h = a
  a = b
  b = h

But I knew the BASIC we used had the SWAP command. On an exam, I used SWAP A,B instead of the above. I got the lowest passing score, a 70%, and the teacher wrote, "Do it our way please". No thanks Mrs. Mott, I'll take the 70.

[cardiffspaceman]

Those folks can FRO. The teacher my wife would have had for a Pascal class in high school refused to let her apply, saying it was not for girls. Her father said, you can take it at community college.

[balex]

Now that's a tattoo right there. Never forget.

[Sardtok]

What a shit teacher: "No, don't be creative and learn. Do only as you're told."

[abustamam]

I do not learn from textbooks at all. I learn from playing. I played with all my toys "wrong" when I was a kid, or so I was always told. I always turned to the last chapter of a math book to see what I'm going to learn or to see if I could figure it out from what I already knew (what I would now call "first principles"). I took appliances apart and tried to put them back together. If I failed to do so my dad would help me put them back together, as long as I didn't tell my mom he was encouraging that behavior :) I watched my older sister play piano and learned the songs she was playing by ear, then asked her to teach me to read music.

This behavior often came out as rebellious or prodigy behavior in grade school but I don't think it's any of that. I think it was just a matter of giving a curious kid space to play and learn and grow. kids like me often don't thrive in rigid environments not because we don't like rules or think they shouldn't apply to us but because our brains just don't work completely linearly.

I'd wager that most kids actually learn better like this but it's not super efficient to cater to 30 different curious kids wanting to learn 30 different things.

[t1234s]

You sir are the hardest person on HN

[sizzle]

How long were you locked up in the clink for? Did you get any access to computers there? How did your time there affect you or change how you think? Thanks for sharing

[clamprecht]

I served 60 months of the 70 month sentence. I had a computer restriction, so I couldn't be around a computer.

Since I wasn't able to use computers or the Internet for that time, I did/read/learned a lot of things I wouldn't have otherwise learned. Learned how to make hooch (prison wine), how the law works and how to maneuver the court system (useful for both civil and criminal cases), got more fluent in French by speaking with some native French speakers from Benin, learned how to work out & lift weights (which I still do), and learned the value of freedom.

[sizzle]

Thanks for the reply, I see you are quite the legend and am all caught up now.

Are you still coding these days? Does AI instill any new sense of awe and wonder or a new found passion for coding/computers? Hope you are in a better place now. Cheers.

[postalcoder]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lamprecht

[lioeters]

> First person banned from the Internet

Legend.

[alterom]

Indeed.

[owenpalmer]

70 months, or 5.83 years

[cyberrock]

Perhaps this is a foolish question: how did your friend actually use the tracker? Did he input the prices from the newspapers or TV news?

[clamprecht]

I'm not sure how much he actually used it after I wrote it for him, to be honest! But we did have access to daily newspapers, and some of us got weekly stock charts called "Daily Charts" by Investor's Business Daily (all paper, of course). Some of us were into trading stocks (this was during the Internet boom 1995-2000). Another weird skill I learned that is still useful to this day.

[znpy]

Since we’re sharing stories…

In high school my stats teacher told us we had to get a proper calculator. She didn’t set any upper limit so i went down the calculators rabbit hole… and got an used ti-86 from 1999 off ebay for 35 euros (this was in 2007 or so).

I programmed software to solve exercises in ti-basic and spent every lesson doing essentially software testing: basically whenever a classmate was called to the blackboard to solve an exercise I’d input the exercise data and verified I got the right results.

I got 9.5 out of 10 to the immediate next test. The teacher took off half a point because i miscopied a number (0.3 rather than 0.03, i still remember that after almost 20 years). It would have otherwise been a perfect test.

Fun times.

I still have that calculator, i turn it on every now and then.

I remember naming that calculator “Annarita”, like a girl I used to like and that (of course, lol) barely knew I existed at all.

[hcrisp]

My TI-85 story involves the fact that it only had 2D plotting (though I think newer models such as the TI-89 had 3D).

I had a 3D calculus class so I wrote a program in it to plot a 3D isometric mesh of a surface using the 2D rendering library. It was slow but got the job done. I used it to help pass a test or two.

I also experimented with drawing random surfaces and objects like a tire. They looked pretty cool for a calculator screen.

The math lab at the college had a cable which you could use to take data off or put it on so you could in theory have exchanged programs with others but this was before the internet so I didn't.

I still have mine and enjoy the sliding the cover off - a trip down memory lane.

Later I rewrote the program in QBasic on a PC for fun and it was lightning fast!

[jamesbfb]

I feel like there’s a blog post in here somewhere…!

[clamprecht]

I should do an AMA at some point. There was a pseudo-AMA on reddit a while back: https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/1z0yx7/first_person...

[rrr_oh_man]

Would you be open for an online coffee sometime? Your life sounds wild.

[racl101]

They had TI-85's in late '90s? I remember there only being TI-83s.

[CobrastanJorji]

They did! The TI-89 is how I aced the AP Math exam.

The TI-92 had recently come out, and it had a QWERTY keyboard and could solve symbolic calculus problems like "find the derivative of 2x^3". This was a problem for the AP exam, since you could just type in the problem and get the answer. They fixed this by banning calculators with QWERTY keyboards. That's just about exactly when the TI-89 came out, which also did symbolic calculus but did not have a QWERTY keyboard, and so it was totally allowed on the exam. Boom, 5/5 exam score for Jorji.

[steve-atx-7600]

Got the 89 first year it came out, loaded a periodic table on it and used it on my high school chemistry exam. Teachers had no clue back then

[chris_hhh]

I had a similar story -- just absolutely acing math with my TI-89 until one teacher finally learned that this TI-83-looking calculator could do symbolic stuff ... just an absolute nightmare after that

Spent some time on ticalc.org too, making some not-great stuff to get me thru those years

https://www.ticalc.org/cgi-bin/acct-view.cgi?userid=34493

[Tuna-Fish]

The -85 was released in 1992, iirc it's TI's second graphing calculator. The -83 is a later model.

[aidenn0]

I was told that one of the designers graduated high-school in '81 and college in '85, so the HS calculator was an 81 and the college calculator was an 85.

[Dwedit]

The order was:

TI-81 (1990)

TI-85 (1992)

TI-82 (1993)

TI-80 (1995)

TI-92 (1995)

TI-83 (1996)

TI-86 (1996)

TI-73 (1998)

TI-83 Plus (1999)

TI-89 (1998)

TI-92 Plus (1998)

TI-83 Plus Silver Edition (2001)

TI-84 Plus (2004)

TI-84 Plus Silver Edition (2004)

[kstrauser]

Anyone here have an idea why the models jumped around like that? Like why'd the 82 come out after the 85, or the 83 after the 92?

[jacobolus]

They had different models with different capabilities. As they made minor style changes, they bumped the numbers slightly. The 81–82–83–84 were basically the same concept, as were the 85–86. The 89 and 92 were higher-end models. The 80 and 73 are simpler models intended for middle school.

All of them are basically a multi-generational scam perpetrated against the hapless parents of American high school students who were told that they needed to buy overpriced anachronistic calculators for their kids to succeed in school. In my opinion the calculators have overall caused more pedagogical harm than benefit; the students would be better served by some combination of (a) problems that can be solved without the tedious but trivial numerical calculations these calculators support, or (b) are solved using a real programming language. If someone really wants to assign simple numerical problems, give the kids slide rules.

Calculators of this type used to make sense for an engineer doing work in the field somewhere, but make no sense in the context of a classroom.

[Aeolun]

Huh. I have only good memories of this calculator. Would buy for my kids in a heartbeat. The fact that it barely changed is a feature to me. I know exactly what they’d be getting.

[wartijn_]

The scam doesn’t just work in the US. In The Netherlands most secondary school students had, and I think still have, to buy these. I imagine in other countries too.

There is an interesting side effect from having always used TI calculators. They use a dot as the decimal separator, not a comma like we do here. There is usually some option to switch, but the hardware button obviously stays the same, so I’ve always been taught to just make that switch in my head, and it has become the natural thing for me to do. I see 1,000.50 on a screen I write down 1.000,50. When I use software that uses a comma as the decimal separator, I get annoyed and it takes some mental effort to enter the right values.

[mrexroad]

> scam

… that continues no matter what. I gave my kid my 89 from the late 90s—I was happy to avoid the TI student tax. Then a year or two back, the college board banned the 89 from certain tests/classes and so I had to cough up for an 84. Even if you take care of your stuff, treat it well to pass on to your kids, the Man finds a way to extract their cut.

[jacobolus]

Plenty of students succeed just fine without owning a graphing calculator (they can spend a few minutes learning the handful of test-relevant features and borrow one for the exam). Thankfully as of this year there is also a Desmos option.

[Dwedit]

I think you can flash a TI83 Plus ROM to a TI73 by using an exploit? One exploit was that flashing an OS writes all the ROM, then checks the signature afterwards, then erases it if it fails. Pull batteries at the correct time and...

[CydeWeys]

One other factor that others haven't yet covered is that the different lines had different capabilities, e.g. the T-89 had Computer Algebra System symbolic manipulation meaning it could pretty much solve many types of math problems on its own, so it wasn't generally allowed in school. And then the Ti-85/86 was a step down, but had matrix support that the lower models lacked, so it was necessary for some specific types of classes.

My favorite was always the TI-85/86 line. I loved those F1-F5 buttons right beneath the screen, which made the interface overall better to navigate. The first programming I ever did was on one of those (either the 85 or 82, can't exactly remember at this point which I owned first). And, the only thing of note I ever had stolen from me was a TI-82, taken out of my unattended backpack by another student during gym class :( (And I had even carved my name into the back of it with a knife, so it would've been identifiable.)

[ethbr1]

This. The thread's confusion comes from looking at these as computers: more capabilities are always an improvement.

In common use, they're intended as mathematical learning aids, a function for which very specific sets of functionality (and no more) are required.

F.ex. basic matrix ops but no auto-solvers

Similar to how you wouldn't give a kid learning how to construct an argumentative essay access to a full LLM if the goal is learning how to perform the task.

[kstrauser]

From a product POV, sure. From an end user’s perspective, I strongly dislike that. There’s no room for growth there. Buy the model that does matrices when you’re taking linear algebra, and you learn that model through and through. Then take an engineering class where you need a solved, and now you have to use a different device that works subtly differently in enough ways that you have to learn all about it.

I just want one device that does everything so my new learning can build on my old.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere here, I love the TI-85 I used through college. I’m no partisan. However, I think that for anything outside a school context, that means skipping any device marketed as “ok to use on tests” and buying an HP. I scarcely need the cool stuff of the HP50g or DM42n I picked up along the way, but if I ever do, I know it’s already in there and waiting for me to discover it.

[0manrho]

They were different lines. The numbers aren't mean to be chronological; similar to how AMD released some 5000 series AM4 Ryzen chips long after they'd moved on to AM5 and 7000/9000 series.

TI83 (1996) was a successor to the TI82 (1993) which was a refresh/update of the TI81 (1990).

TI85 (1992) was the second model they made, originally intended as a higher end version of the TI81.

Similar reasoning for the rest of their line up. Different models had different features, and then those models would get incremental updates/refreshes over the years.

I wasn't part of the team or anything, so if anyone has any insight to why exactly they called it that in the first place, I'd be interested to know, but generally speaking the answer is: When they released the first one in 1990, they didn't name it under the presumption that this family of devices would be a staple educational/academic electronics device for the next 3 decades with dozen(s?) of different iterations/generations over the years.

[jordanb]

A lot of it had to do with capability. The TI 92 was considerably more capable than the 83. The 89 had better software than the 92 but with a smaller form factor. The 92+ was the 92 with the 89 software.

[FarmerPotato]

The encyclopedia of TI calculators is http://www.datamath.org

Joerg Warner has been collecting them exhaustively, and peering inside for date codes and such.

[MengerSponge]

If anybody here can illuminate where these names came from, I'd love to know!

[swasheck]

i created a program to make it appear like i wiped my formulas before before a calc 2 final in high school so that when the teacher witnessed us wipe the phones it seemed legit.

[JohnBooty]

In HS, teachers hadn't even caught on to that possibility yet.

I programmed quite a cheat sheet worth of formulae etc into my calc. Right before the test, I dropped it onto the floor. The battery cover popped off and the AA batteries popped out.

These were TI-81s (IIRC) so no battery backup -- it was a full memory wipe every time you changed batteries. Sooooooooooooo... goodbye cheat sheet!

However, I aced that test anyway, legitimately. Creating the cheat sheet actually helped me to learn the material. There's a lesson or two in there somewhere...

[sikozu]

That's such a fantastic story.

[nodra]

Love this

[adi_chaa]

this made me giggle lol