Learning all the basic of programming
In the summer between 11th grade and 12th grade, my friend Yves-Eric from Honfleur, spent a few weeks as an exchange student in the US. Before he left, I placed an order with him, to get electronics at a cheaper price, as well as not necessarily available in France. He brought me back a TI-59 and an 8080A microprocessor. I will dedicate a blog to the microprocessor, and just covered some of my learning and experience with the TI-59…
Texas Instrument introduced in 1977-78 a series of calculators that were programmable, and even included long term storage for the TI-59. The memory was divided between the program and the memories. from 160 steps and 100 memories to 960 steps and no memory (10 memories = 80 steps…)
The long term storage was made of strip of magnetic tapes, which were controlled by a small motor inside the calculator. You would introduce them on the left, and they would come out on the right.
Each trip of the card, you had the opportunity to read the card, or write the card with your code or data.
Both the TI-58 and 59, also had an expension port in the battery compartment, and one could connect a thermal printer (called pc-100), which was tremendously useful, as the program size increased dramatically.
Learning all the basics…
With this device, I learned to write longer programs, to print listings, do backups, trace my code…
This was very exploratory. At the same time in france, appeared many monthly publications about programming. So there was no shortage of subjects, and opportunity to port code from one language to the TI-59. Lunar lander!!!
While this was a bit faster than the Commodore PR-100, it was still really slow…