Comment by clamprecht
2 days ago
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.
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.
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.
The fact that you made a game on a device that "wasn't for games" is even cooler.
The essence of hack.
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
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Now that's a tattoo right there. Never forget.
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.
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.
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?
rigidity
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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.
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I relay to you a nugget from my ancestor: "Man, this teacher sounds like a real shithead!"
In high school our computer class was in BASIC. They taught us to swap two variables A & B like this:
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.
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.
What a shit teacher: "No, don't be creative and learn. Do only as you're told."
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.
You sir are the hardest person on HN
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lamprecht
> First person banned from the Internet
Legend.
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70 months, or 5.83 years
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?
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.
I feel like there’s a blog post in here somewhere…!
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...
Would you be open for an online coffee sometime? Your life sounds wild.
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.
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...
They had TI-85's in late '90s? I remember there only being TI-83s.
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.
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
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
The -85 was released in 1992, iirc it's TI's second graphing calculator. The -83 is a later model.
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.
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)
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?
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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.
If anybody here can illuminate where these names came from, I'd love to know!
That's such a fantastic story.
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.
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!
Love this
this made me giggle lol