[hallowtech]

> Bellard, born in 1972, began practicing his own coding techniques first on a TI-59 scientific calculator, at the beginning of the ‘80s.

I wonder how many people have started their programming experience on a TI calculator. I had the same way in with a TI-85.

[c3d]

TI 57 here. Then went on with the HP-28 and HP-48. Wrote the first game using hardware scroll on the HP-48 (a Pacman).

Interesting that beyond the TI calculator, there are a few other parallels with Bellard: I studied in one of the top French engineering school (Mines de Paris), wrote a 3D program as a student (Alpha Waves, Guiness book for first 3D platformer), an open-source compiler (XL, http://xlr.sf.net), a machine emulator with dynamic translation (HP Integrity Virtual Machine, a VM for Itanium), worked on a C++ compiler (HP aC++), dabbled in Emacs (e.g. first graphical Emacs for MacOSX back in the Rhapsody days), designed or wrote some code used all over the world (e.g. modern C++ exception handling), I sometimes took really new and "minimal" approaches to old and complex problems (e.g. the scanner and parser for XLR total 1500 lines of rather simple C++ code). I keep studying physics like Bellard kept studying math, and came up with my ow wild ideas (e.g. I'm delusional enough to believe I know how to unify GTR and QM).

But there's a couple of pretty major differences as well. Bellard's work was always freely available. Except for XL, mine was mostly proprietary (and XL, an exception to the rule, was a resounding flop as far as community involvment was concerned). Alpha Waves was a commercial product. HPVM was a commercial product. aC++ was a commercial product. And today, they are all dead or dying. As for fame, I'll let you judge of Bellard's fame relative to mine ;-)

I think that there is a lesson here about the strength of openness. If you start your career, making your stuff open and sharing freely may be a pretty good move...

[chipsy]

Hey, I recognized Alpha Waves! But I have to agree that the open approach seems to be a better career move...and maybe increasingly so these days since there are so many programmers around that if you don't open something, someone else will immediately start cloning it.

[RegEx]

TI-82 here. I made small applications to do my 7th grade algebra homework. They took longer to make than just doing the homework, but I enjoyed automation.

[jerf]

While I first fiddled with a Commodore 64, my first program that I could reasonably call non-trivial was on an HP-48G. Well, I'd call it trivial to me today, but it wasn't trivial to me then.

I can't speak to the TI series, but one nifty thing about RPN is that where 80s-style microcomputer BASIC tends to afford spaghetti code, the RPN afforded breaking your program down into functions. If you didn't break it down properly, your program turned into a series of hundreds of DUP DUP + SWAP3 DRAWLN 73 SWAP DUP - DRAWLN 0x838AFE7E8A9E 3 4 108 93 BLITPIX etc etc in an undifferentiated mass. (Those aren't the real opcodes, I've long since forgotten them and won't look them up, but that's sort of trying to compute where to draw two lines then dumping a pixmap to the screen.)

[allertonm]

Yeah, me too... TI-51 III (aka TI-55 in US) in the late 70s - belonging to my father, who had it for his job but never got to use it much because I was always playing with it. He later got me a copy of this book - http://books.google.ca/books?id=ySZhMJrzhw4C&pg=PT48&... - and that's really where my computing career began.

[zalzane]

TI-84 here. I actually tried to get into java a few years earlier (like 9 or 10 years old), but ran into loads of problems trying to get a decent tutorial. Everything about TI-BASIC was right there in the manual, which removed all the bullshit of learning a real programming language.

[jacalata]

I started on a TI-89, writing quizzes and quadratic equation solvers. When I got to college and found that other kids in the class had written racing games on theirs I felt like I was out of my depth - I can't imagine how the kids who'd never programmed felt.

[jcdavis]

I started on my TI-83+ and then later moved up to a TI-89, which was great for wannabe programmers because you could easily write programs in C (using TIGCC) instead of having to deal with the limitations of TI-BASIC.

[rbanffy]

TI-55 here. Tough. No conditional branch. Not even branches except RST...

The next one was a CASIO PB-700.

[dhimes]

does HP count? 41-CV (there's an iphone app for it!)

[mahmud]

TI-82 here, my first programmable computer.