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.
Almost identical boat here. Had a borrowed TI-83, freshman year wrote 2048 && 1/2 of chess with only knowing basic variable usage, if, goto, and matrix indexing. Found out about actual loops and the ability to call a basic program from another latter.
Ah I was a few years later on the TI-86. Around 1999.
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.
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.
Most teachers were not good at checking this. There was an archive mechanism which would compress the file and IIRC, prevent it from showing up in the program list. You could of course just unarchive it.
Even though I never cheated, I never wanted my programs to get erased... I just created an image of the "memory erased" screen and showed that to the teachers.
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!
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!
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.
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...
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.