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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
by clamprecht 5mo 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.
- t1234s 5mo agoYou sir are the hardest person on HN
- sizzle 5mo agoHow 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
- postalcoder 5mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lamprecht https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lamprecht
- owenpalmer 5mo ago70 months, or 5.83 years
- clamprecht 5mo agoI 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.
- sizzle 5mo agoThanks for the reply, I see you are quite the legend and am all caught up now. Are you still coding these days? Does AI instill any new sense of awe and wonder or a new found passion for coding/computers? Hope you are in a better place now. Cheers.
- jamesbfb 5mo agoI feel like there’s a blog post in here somewhere…!
- clamprecht 5mo agoI 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_ever_banned_from_the_internet_gives/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/1z0yx7/first_person...
- racl101 5mo agoThey had TI-85's in late '90s? I remember there only being TI-83s.
- Tuna-Fish 5mo agoThe -85 was released in 1992, iirc it's TI's second graphing calculator. The -83 is a later model.
- aidenn0 5mo agoI 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.
- Dwedit 5mo agoThe 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)
- kstrauser 5mo agoAnyone 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?
- jacobolus 5mo agoThey had different models with different capabilities. As they made minor style changes, they bumped the numbers slightly. The 81–82–83–84 were basically the same concept, as were the 85–86. The 89 and 92 were higher-end models. The 80 and 73 are simpler models intended for middle school. All of them are basically a multi-generational scam perpetrated against the hapless parents of American high school students who were told that they needed to buy overpriced anachronistic calculators for their kids to succeed in school. In my opinion the calculators have overall caused more pedagogical harm than benefit; the students would be better served by some combination of (a) problems that can be solved without the tedious but trivial numerical calculations these calculators support, or (b) are solved using a real programming language. If someone really wants to assign simple numerical problems, give the kids slide rules. Calculators of this type used to make sense for an engineer doing work in the field somewhere, but make no sense in the context of a classroom.
- sikozu 5mo agoThat's such a fantastic story.
- nodra 5mo agoLove this
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- cyberrock 5mo agoPerhaps this is a foolish question: how did your friend actually use the tracker? Did he input the prices from the newspapers or TV news?
- clamprecht 5mo agoI'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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- adi_chaa 5mo agothis made me giggle lol
- pizzafeelsright 5mo agoYou'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.
- clamprecht 5mo agoThe fact that you made a game on a device that "wasn't for games" is even cooler.
- anthk 5mo agoYou can write a game in almost every language. Check these ones written even on really low specs VM's: https://codeberg.org/luxferre/mu808 https://codeberg.org/luxferre/mu808 This could be adapted https://codeberg.org/luxferre/scoundrel-ports https://codeberg.org/luxferre/scoundrel-ports More info at https://luxferre.top https://luxferre.top
- noworld 5mo agoOne time I wrote a game in English.
- anthk 5mo agoWith Inform7 targeting the ZMachine VM you can literally say that =). Inform6 it's a 'small' OOP language where with the English library the syntax it's dumber than VB6, Lua or anything else. Basically the objects and logic describe themselves as a dumbed down config file. You create a meta-object for rooms and light, and then copy and paste to create rooms, containers and tools based on atributes (again as if it were a simple config file). Inform6 example: https://jxself.org/git/?p=cloak-of-darkness.git;a=blob_plain;f=cloak-of-darkness.inf;h=e8d748c3916b2be50d121ab5a50b2c5392b96869;hb=HEAD https://jxself.org/git/?p=cloak-of-darkness.git;a=blob_plain... Inform6 compiler: https://jxself.org/git/inform.git https://jxself.org/git/inform.git (cc -o inform src/* ) Inform6 lib https://jxself.org/git/informlib.git https://jxself.org/git/informlib.git To compile Cloak... inform +lib cloak-of-darkness.inf Lib should be the English library, you can get it with git submodule update --init --recursive or copy informlib to lib/ To play the game: frotz cloak-of-darkness.z5 Or LectRote under Mac... or WinFrotz under Windows, it will work the same. With Inform7 you just write clauses in English, the interpreter will write IF6 code for you and then call the inform6 compiler to create a Z5-8 game ready to run. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform#Inform_7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform#Inform_7 As you can see, no AI needed, no LLM's, no huge GB sized software, just a Pentium MMX could be enough for i7, a 8-16 bit machine for Puny Inform games (kinda like Inform6 'lite'), a 16 bit machine for z3-z5 games and maybe a 'high end' 16 bit computer for Z8 games. A 386 PC would be enough to run 'complex' text adventures. And consistent enough unlike LLM's where the objects' enviroment is lost everytime.
- rrr_oh_man 5mo agoWould you be open for an online coffee sometime? Your life sounds wild.
- znpy 5mo agoSince 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.
- hcrisp 5mo agoMy 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!
- swasheck 5mo agoi 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.
- JohnBooty 5mo agoIn 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...