Me too!

I used it to enter my school's science fair where I wrote a program that was a couple thousand lines to calculate, chart, and explore the relationship between musical notes and frequencies. I didn't have a thesis or anything, just did a bunch of programming, and the judges did not care for it haha. At the time, I didn't even realize it was "programming" a computer, it was just fun!

Once I started to learn to program for real, I thought it was weird that I had to type all the characters myself rather than selecting from a list of pre-defined functions!

Same here!

I remember hacking a loop into TI-Basic by having programs call into each other, since there was no looping control flow built in.

Never did write anything more advanced than TI-basic, I'd heard horror stories of people bricking calculators, and mine was an emotionally sensitive hand-me-down.

I wrote a fair amount of assembly for my TI-83 and some assembly and C for my TI-89. I don’t remember it being possible to accidentally brick the calculators because if you messed up enough and froze everything, you just took the batteries out, opened up the case and popped out the little hearing-aid battery which reset everything.

I'm sure that would work - over the years since I learned much more about computers, and realized I needn't have worried so much.

My misconception came from an article I read at some point which described assembly/C (I think) programming as more risky, and I just took it at face value.

It was definitely annoying and if you didn’t have a screwdriver to get inside it was “bricked.”

The one thing I was never brave enough to do was overclock. Supposedly it was just unsoldering a capacitor which would do something like 3x the clock speed.

TI-BASIC definitely had loops, though maybe not on the version you had? I had the TI-85/86 (which were mostly identical, the 85 was stolen by a student in the tutoring lab I volunteered in in high school). Looking up TI-83 manuals, they had for and while loops.

I was on a TI-83, not a plus, and couldn't find them at all.

Always possible I was just an idiot. I remember having looked it up, but I was also a dumb high schooler at the time.

What at least the 85/86 series didn't permit (86 was almost identical to the 85) was direct recursion, which woulds fail immediately. I don't think I ever tried indirect recursion, which also would have failed. If I understand correctly, the problem was that there was no call stack (in the way every mainstream language does things anymore). So the return address location for a program was singular, if you made multiple (recursive, direct or indirect) calls into a program where it would return to was whatever the last call set the return address to. Like old school COBOL and FORTRAN where procedures were non-reentrant. Of course, I was in high school too and didn't know about the inner workings of computers like that. So I figured out how to use the list data structure on the calculator as a stack to create my own "recursive" programs either trampolining (A calls B repeatedly in a loop until the list-as-stack is emptied, indicating termination) or with loops (skip the call to B and keep it all in one program).

Limitations lead to creativity.

I had a TI-83+, not a TI-83, so I can't be sure but I suspect you're misremembering which feature was missing: The + did have while loops but didn't have functions, but calling another program worked like a function call with no parameters and no return value (and you could fake both by using the global variables).

`Ans` stored the value of the last expression, so you could use that as a “return value” of sorts.

Lol, unfortunately I think you just missed it. Software-wise, the TI-83 was nearly identical to the plus. I actually had a later revision of TI-83 that had an identical housing to the plus, but with differently tinted buttons.