History of the TI community

[Xeda112358]

Awesome! I was directed here when i made a comment that I wanted to learn the history of the calc programming community. I already PMed DJ for info earlier, but I hope this can someday be a reality o.o Even if it takes a few years, the amount of history available could make for a huge document o.o

EDIT: I necroposted >.>

EDIT2: So that I don't go off and email more people that have been contacted, has anybody contacted others for an interview or anything yet?

[Juju]

Someone should update the WikiTI page?

[Xeda112358]

Oh dear, I don't even know where to begin. That is just like a timeline of events, right? I wanted to see if I could get into the stuff like the politics and meanings of certain events. Even if it is just little stuff like the nDoom policy here or if there is anything elsewhere.

[chickendude]

What exactly do you want to know? There are still a few longtimers around.
Does anyone remember when ticalc took down the FTP part of the site? I still remember the (user)names of a lot of the people (and spammers ) who used to go to ticalc from maybe 2000-2003 (when i sorta dropped out). I remember wishing that i had a "19XXX" user ID (i'm 21051)
Also, i never knew that Alex Highsmith (Dying Eyes!) founded TI-Files. I don't think i ever actually got to go there, i remember waiting forever and ever for the new and improved "version 2" of TI-Files and how it ended up being some sort of adult site?? Something along those lines.

Btw, have you all played Dying Eyes? I wonder if it gets overlooked these days... I looked at the source a few years ago and even thought about rewriting it to be more optimized and add a few things (maybe smooth scrolling?).

[Xeda112358]

Things like how people interacted, what projects were going, the story behind them (the projects), who (multiple people) lead the community, what were the big events, how sites interacted, and if there has ever been site politics.

[TIfanx1999]

Ah, the TI-files. Back in the day it used to be TIcalc.org, The Ti-files, and Dimension TI. There used to be quite a heated rivalry going on between those three to be the top archive site. I find it kind of amazing that TIcalc.org is still around after all this time!

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yeah I remember reading that one of ticalc staff hacked TI-Files then apologised and got fired, but then started to troll ticalc.org comment boards. Dimension TI AKA Calc.org had quite a run but it never recovered from the 2002 server crash and TI-Files never recovered from hacking incidents and downtimes. Ticalc indeed had quite a good run.

I think site rivalries tend to happen when at least two sites have nearly equal activity or amount of good releases/programmers, since both sites tend to have a few more loyal members who think one site is better than the other, sometimes there is jealousy and often it's due to clashing mentalities (such as United-TI vs MaxCoderz back in the days where on UTI some people were anti-xLIB/Omnicalc/CODEX while on MaxCoderz people were pro-ASM and defended users of libs in BASIC. The year before, fights occured too due to some people MC being anti-BASIC althogether and United-TI staff often tried to defend the interests of TI-BASIC coders while some people on MC found BASIC programmers to be inferior people.

Nowadays it's pretty much Cemetech and Omnimaga that are active the most and sometimes there are backlashes between some users due to mentality differences in some ways, although often they are fueled by one or two people and by misunderstandings (the language barrier on Omni doesn't help either). There isn't much that can be done, regardless of the site involved, plus I think having at least two different site is the best for the members and community health (remembering the TIMGUL incident in 2009).

[Xeda112358]

Cool, this is pretty interesting. So there was some rivalry... So when those calc sites existed, did they all pop up around the same time because sites didn't exist yet, or was it like people wanted to get a piece of the action?

[TIfanx1999]

I'm not sure which was first. Ticalc has been around since they hacked the TI-85 I think, so maybe 95 or 96? I think they have an article about it somewhere on TIcalc. They must've all been around similar time periods. It was a our archive is better/ more complete/ more awesome then yours sort of thing. I think Dimension TI was the last to come about and Ticalc.org and the TI Files were the two that were the most competitive with one another.

[chickendude]

Also, calcgames.org was pretty popular, especially for 89 stuff (Tankers!). Nowadays the community is so small that i think people are just happy to see new users. Ten years ago there were new programming groups/sites every week, after a while a bunch of groups either merged or drifted away. I wonder where all the (for me, being mostly interested in 82/3/+) "classic" programmers went, Sam Heald, Harper Maddox, pretty much everyone from Void Productions, Hannes Edfeldt ("movax": who hasn't seen movax's sprite routine?!), etc. etc. And yeah, there were a lot of discussions (or arguments) between ASM/BASIC programmers, a lot of ASM programmers trying to convince BASIC programmers to learn ASM, then some of the first really comprehensive libraries for BASIC programs came out. To be honest, i don't really know too much about the BASIC side, as i pretty much focused on ASM groups, though i did get addicted to the FFTOM series

Oh! And then there were the infamous 6 month program upload queues at ticalc Kind of crazy to think now that there used to be hundreds and hundreds of new programs uploaded everyday, for pretty much all calculators. I used to update my calculators daily with the new programs uploaded the night before. I also remember when they started a huge move to add in screenshots, reviews, etc. sometime in 2004 i believe.

[Xeda112358]

I would like to mention that Burr over on TIBD has made a start on this. He has a list of people and teams and he is asking the folks there for the kind of questions we should ask and if we should continue this venture.
Here is the topic:
http://tibasicdev.wikidot.com/forum/t-438087/ti-basic-legends

[Deep Toaster]

I really want to see something like this completed. There are a lot of individual group history pages (Omnimaga, Cemetech, ticalc, and TI|BD), as well as hosted pages about older groups (SiCoDe and a few others on ticalc.org), but I can't find any for the community as a whole better than the one on WikiTI, which really needs updating.

[TIfanx1999]

@Chickendude: Oh man, you've got me suffering from nostalgia. Back then though a lot of the programs were clones of one another, or quadratic solvers, or authors updating buggy programs that they'd released too quickly. This accounted for the large backup in files being approved. There was a lot of quantity over quality back then. I do wonder where a lot of those old cats went and what they're up to now( Shame on you for not mentioning Bill Nagel or Hideaki Omuro(Crashman) )

[chickendude]

I can only wonder how many of us learned asm with AsmGuru Ah, and Bill Nagel! Who could ever forget Penguins (or Jimmy Mårdell's Sqrxz (Skwerks?)), before a decent Mario-clone came out? They still stop by from time to time, but Dwedit/Dan Weiss has done a lot of amazing things, too. And i wonder if Joltima 2 was ever written for the GBC...

Patrick Davidson's site has a bunch of links/info on the TI community's history, too:
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~pad/

EDIT: Whoaah! Looking for info on Joltima II i stumbled across this:
http://www.emudesc.net/foros/gbc/116474-infinity.html

It looks like Joltima II was started by Affinix Software (you can see Justin there in the about page) and after starting work on it they sorta ditched it and used it as the base for a new RPG: Infinity. Check out the video's there, it looks really nice. Unfortunately it wasn't ever finished, though they said they were thinking of releasing a ROM of the game, but it doesn't appear they've ever done that. It's a bummer it wasn't finished, it seems it's mostly because the GBC started losing ground to the GBA and no one wanted to publish it. I guess that pretty much puts an end to a question that's been haunting me for years

[Xeda112358]

On IRC, Brandon W mentioned these guys:
Magnus Hagander
Bill Nagel