Ah I was so into writing TI-BASIC (and eventually, experimenting with z80) on my TI calculator! I would be carrying it to every class. This was before smartpho

Ah I was so into writing TI-BASIC (and eventually, experimenting with z80) on my TI calculator! I would be carrying it to every class. This was before smartphones and I had a lot of times where I had nothing better than to write program on the calculator. I wrote so many things, like a hangman game (with a wide vocabulary) and an RPG fully in TI-BASIC, with a 2D map and a combat system. You could store only a limited number of pictures, so I made up a format for mapping pictures into strings, with a corresponding encoder and decoder. My favorite program I wrote is ELIZA, a copy of the famous therapist AI program (actually inspired by the alt-text of the xkcd linked in the article!). It had like 30 rules or so and worked remarkably well, to the extent that I would talk to it often through my problems.