Though I have absolutely no proof of it since that era is both a black hole for usenet and before calc-ti.org, I believe I can claim to have published the first

Though I have absolutely no proof of it since that era is both a black hole for usenet and before calc-ti.org, I believe I can claim to have published the first fake-grayscale demo in asm for the TI-85. This would have been in maybe 1993 or 1994 I think. It was a 4-frame animation of Bevis and Butthead headbanging, and since it was essentially stored as 16 uncompressed bitmaps, it took the calculator's entire memory. Getting grayscale out of a mono LCD was obviously not a unique idea, but at least I independently arrived at the notion that it could work. I hammered out the TI-BASIC version and proved it sorta worked, but only if I could make my program run fast enough. I should mention that I was 12. Before zShell existed, my only programming as a kid had been things like BASIC and Logo; the closest I ever got to anything more fun was some type-in programs that used a whole lot of opaque POKE and PEEK statements, and I got frustrated trying to get C64 programs I got from a book at school working on the Apple ][. I was shit at porting software in middle school. Going from this straight to z80 asm was insane, but the naivety of youth gave me confidence. My programs would be harder to write but they would run faster. Naturally the fastest program would be the hardest to write, so z80 asm it was. I was hooked. I became a software developer. I remember specifically in those early days emailing with Magnus Hagandar, Dan Eble, and Mattias Lindqvist. Thanks to each of you and to all the other early TI fans who helped me along and put up with me. In later years I learned most of this community were also basically kids playing adult on the early Internet. What a time it was!