Well, just meant we had to make a 2.0 version that allowed you to do operations on the calculator within the app. That one we didn't distribute to friends, but just kept for ourselves.
Man, those were the days...
A friend and I wrote a chat program that used the GraphLink cable to send messages back and forth so we could chat in class. This was a neat hack, but considering the cable that came with the 85 was like 2 feet long, it was kinda useless in practice unless we were sitting at the same table. So I made a longer cable at home out of stuff from RadioShack.
Everything was cool until we got caught using the homebrew cable in class. Fortunately, once we showed the principal what we'd done, we were let off with a warning not to have the cable in class anymore. :)
You know, I think I might still have my TI-85 in a box somewhere. I wonder if any of my old programs are still there.
On my TI-83+, I could transfer RAM programs into flash, to "archive" them. Wasn't that an option on the TI-84+?
I think the ti-84 actually had a USB port (or a redesigned port of some sort), which eliminated this issue.
I feel for your loss though, whatever the circumstances were. The first graphing calculator I had access to was a TI-81. No flash space, RAM only. And since it had been my mother's when she went back to college, by the time I was using it, the button battery was pretty "iffy".
I wrote a program that could solve almost any formulaic problem in Chemistry, Algebra or Geometry. I shared it with a bunch of people, but ended up losing it because my link port broke. I had made a ton of money in High School charging $10 to fix broken link ports, but at that point I hadn't developed a method to fix a link port without disconnecting all of the batteries. And so I lost all my programs when the ram was cleared for a standardized test.
Programming on Ti-84's is one of the most fun I've ever had, and I'm sure I learned more writing those programs than I did in class. Even the non-CS nerds were programming stuff.