An Ode to TI Basic

This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for a lot of things: for being in school majoring in my favorite subject ever, for landing an awesome internship at Yelp, and a whole lot more. But I’m also pretty darn thankful for the little things, like having a halfway decent programming language and a computer.

You see, it wasn’t always that way. Not even for me, a 21 year old programmer who was never alive to see a time before the world wide web. Much like the founding fathers of computing had to deal with limited computers and terrible programming languages, I had to deal with my own struggles in middle and high school: a TI-84 calculator.

These monstrosities were approximately the shape of a brick, and just about as heavy. Their screen resolution was just a bit better than a wrist watch, coming in at 96x64. The Z80 processor that came inside it was probably worth its weight in pennies, and the permanent storage maxed out at 2 MB. But, on the flip side, it had a built-in programming language, TI-BASIC. And to a geek like me who was just learning to program, that was the best thing ever.

Being in middle and high school is a sensation that we quickly forget (probably for good reason). But if you think back to it, you probably remember that the general idea was that you were trapped in a building for about 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, shuffling from class to class. That’s a lot of downtime, and probably even more time spent not paying attention in class. The real kicker in all of this is that you aren’t even sitting in front of a computer, so you can’t even spend any of this downtime on a newly discovered interest like programming. Unless, of course, you happened to own this (almost) pocket-sized programmable calculator.

The TI-84 was what kept me hooked on programming during the years of school before college. Not only could I write programs whenever I wanted, but they could even be useful. It was really common for me to learn how to solve a type of problem in a math or science class, and then write a program that would solve it for me. After that, I could always check my answers on tests. I also tried my hand at making a few games.

Of course, now that I’m away from the constraints of middle and high school, I could never go back to writing TI-BASIC on a TI-84 again. It’s like pulling teeth, and here’s why:

• The code editor on the TI-84 was an 8 line display, and each line could hold 16 characters. So most programs were impossible to read and visualize on the screen. I spent more time than I’d care to admit copying code onto a piece of paper, so that I could draw “indentation guides” and see all of the code at once.
• In order to enter most commands on the TI-84 code editor, you had to navigate through a series of menus on screen to select it. Your speed was roughly proportional to the number of menus you had memorized.
• The only numeric variables you got were the letters A through Z, and maybe a theta. You were also allowed to store approximately 6 lists (L1 through L6), exactly 10 matrices ([A] through [J]), 10 “pictures” (Pic0-9), and 10 “strings” (Str0-9). It was pretty normal to have a sheet of paper just for you to write out what each variable represented.
• TI-BASIC was an interpreted language. Running on 15 MHz calculator, it sometimes felt like it would have been faster to do the calculations by hand.
• The programming language had no functions. Its only control flow features were If, Then, Else (no Else-If), For loops, While loops, and finally Labels and Gotos. So throw structured programming out the window, am I right?

I could go on about the shortcomings of this calculator for hours, but I think you get the idea. And even as much as I can rant about it, the truth is I have a pretty love-hate relationship with the thing. So I guess I have two things to be thankful of. First, I’m glad that devices like this exist to get kids’ interest in programming, like it did for me. Second, I’m thankful that we have much better programming languages and computers today, so I won’t have to deal with it again!

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