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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I learned TI BASIC on a Texas Instruments 99/4a back in the very early 80s. Wrote some programs from magazines, saved them on tapes, and went on to automate D&D character creation in an attempt to rules-lawyer an all-PC dwarf army.

    Fun fact, though: TI BASIC lived on until at least the late 90s, on the TI graphing calculators that everyone taking Algebra/Trig had to buy – or borrow from the school. I wrote a surreal choose-your-own-adventure game on my calculator, large enough that because of memory limitations, you couldn’t open the file to edit it without deleting another, ancillary file.

    And since you could transfer programs via a proprietary cable, I put that game on every school calculator and as many of my friends’ as wanted it. It was still there years later when I visited.


  • Interesting article. I think the money quotes that shifted my POV a little were these:

    It has become a leading source of information in this country. About one-third of Americans under 30 regularly get their news from it.

    and

    American law has long restricted foreign ownership of television or radio stations, even by companies based in friendly countries. “Limits on foreign ownership have been a part of federal communications policy for more than a century,”

    It does place the ban in some more relevant historical context.