It's funny how many software developers got into it due to being bored in class with a TI-83 and randomly trying to create programs.

That brings back memories...

In 2008 I was in high school and wrote a TI-BASIC tutorial in German [0] on my blog that became by far the most popular thing I wrote - maybe on par with my post about how to fix a quest bug in Skyrim by teleporting Delphine.

I was a bit mad back then that people for some reason appreciated those posts more than many very deep teenager ramblings about politics/philosophy :D

[0]: https://archive.haukeluebbers.de/2008/12/ti-basic-tutorial-1...

I hope / don't hope to be famous enough one day that people start looking through my blog and forum posts from when I was a teenager. :|

From https://youtu.be/SlGRN8jh2RI?si=osz3-ssDO7dnvKD-&t=103

Ilya S?

There‘s HP calculator guys and TI guys. Around the age of 17 I spent lots of time programming my HP28s calculator in a Forth like language that had symbolic mathematics, lots of ideas from Scheme (closures, functions as first class arguments, recursion). It felt like magic dealing with concepts I hadn’t seen in the C compiler on my Amiga or later in Turbo Pascal. But I saw these concepts later in Mathematica and was familiar.

I had programmed games, complex 3d visualisations (super slow but oh well), and was totally fascinated by what this device could do.

The original manual for the TI83+ is what actually got me into programming. It was pretty nice.