At the end of the second in high school, I acquired a Texas Instruments TI-92. I had no idea that this would bring me into the world of computer programming. And that this would therefore trace my choice of post-baccalaureate orientation, as well as at the same time my choice of professional career.
The fact of having done an article on the Amstrad PC1512 not long ago reminded me of the TI-92. This came much later, but it contributed like the PC1512 to charting my professional path.
After spending a good part of the summer discovering agricultural work as a summer job, I used part of that hard-earned salary to buy myself a TI-92.
Texas Instruments TI-92: The Setup
Compared to the calculators of the time, it was quite a machine:
- a real QWERTY keyboard with function keys (F1, F2, …). This contributes to greatly facilitate the entry compared to a conventional calculator. Before the TI-92 I had a TI-82, and you had to be really motivated to enter lines of code with it
- a Motorola 68000 processor at 10Mhz
- 128KB of RAM
- Ability to plot 2D and 3D graphs
- An advanced programming language, TI-Basic
Programming with the TI-92
Initially, I bought books with ready-made programs. It was “enough” to copy them and make them work on the calculator. It was quite tedious, but it had the merit on the other hand of grasping everything. And so little by little to become familiar with the language.
For example, you can find on this dedicated TI forum a PDF of the programming book for games with the TI-82, this will give you an idea with the lines of code.
A program on IT will therefore look something like this:
It is a procedural language, in which you can find conditions, loops, jumps among others.
If you want to discover the language much more in depth, I invite you to consult this page on TI-Basic . It’s quite complete, and it should be enough for you if you have an IT lying around and want to get started
By dint of copying (stupidly at the beginning) these lines of code in the books to play Tetris, Othello, the naval battle…, and thanks to the comments which were present opposite the lines, this allowed me to then make my first not in programming, and to develop my first programs. Given that at the time I was in 1st grade, and that post-baccalaureate orientation questions arose at that time, this strongly contributed to my choice to start software development.
Okay, so I’m going to find out where the TI-92 is. And redo a few lines of code
