I began learning how to program sometime in middle school. I had a TI-82 calculator, which was programmable via TI BASIC. It did not, however, have a data por

I began learning how to program sometime in middle school. I had a TI-82 calculator, which was programmable via TI BASIC. It did not, however, have a data port, so all the programs had to be written on the calculator itself. My friends all had TI-83 calculators, with data ports. They had all kinds of cool games that they shared back and forth. I thought one of the games, SNAKEGAME, was really cool, so I figured out how to copy it to my calculator. I opened up the BASIC source code on my friend's TI-83, and manually copied the whole thing, character by character, into my TI-82. Of course, along the way I made a few typos, and so when I first tried to run SNAKEGAME it blew up with a vague error. I went back through the program, line by line, looking for differences between my version and the original. When I finally got the game running, things were... odd. I hunted down the remaining typos, and in doing so I discovered a few things. I found out that I could just change a number in the source, and the snake would be longer. Or faster. Or he'd do crazy things. This was basically my enlightenment. I started changing one thing after another to see what it would do, and eventually I became fairly familiar with TI BASIC. I looked at the source for other games, and eventually started making my own. At first, they were ridiculously simple, but eventually I made a couple that were slightly entertaining. After that, in high school a friend lent me a book about C++, and I struggled through it. I wrote lots and lots of half-assed, totally crappy, unplayable games, and eventually started learning other languages and getting better.