TI-Story

[Xeda112358]

I don't typically do too many news related topics, but I feel like this one is worth our attention. A little while ago, there was discussion about creating a so-called "TI-Story." This would be a history of the TI calc programming community that most of us newer members would not normally be privy to. I had taken interest in it because I have been around for five years or so, but nearly all of the great programmers of old have since moved on to families, other jobs, and generally away from the calc community. However, their feats are nevertheless remarkable and they are people that I want to emulate. As crazy as it sounds to an outsider, programmers in the calculator community like Brandon Wilson, Michael Vincent, Dan Englender and others are role models to me. They weren't just programmers. These were people that pushed boundaries, broke limits, and sought and compiled knowledge. Today, we have several community made programming languages like Axe and Grammer and amazing tools like Celtic 3 and DoorsCS 7. These would have been very difficult to make had their predecessors not been around. MirageOS, OmniCalc, xLIB. These are programs still used today because they were made by great programmers with novel ideas.

So much has happened that I cannot even begin to go over because I hardly know it all, but that is why we have TI-Story. Burr from TI-Basic Developer recently took the initiative to begin this project, and already it is starting to fill out with info. Tons of research and time have been going into it trying to locate all of the programming teams, communities, and important people. They are not limiting this to just English speaking people, either. A good chunk of our community is French and German speaking, if you did not know, and so those communities are being looked at as well.

Our community has made big news on several occasions in our short (nearly 20 years) history, from cracking an RSA to porting the ever popular Doom game. Personally, I think it's cool that we as a minority programming community can be an influence.

If you want to check out TI-Story at its current state, check it out on TIBD here. Burr already has ideas of moving it to its own Wiki with help from Kevin Ouellet (founder of Omnimaga) and Kerm Martian (founder of Cemetech).