This program, made around age 14-15, might have been my first-ever program. At least, it was the first ever program that had some real-world utility beyond a “hello world”, or a simple list of commands in a bash script.

If there was ever an initial spark that showed me joys of programming, this was it. I used it, improved it, shared it, and cared about it for months.

“Pixpaint”, as I eventually dubbed it, started from a simple (and likely haphazard) discovery: my school-prescribed TI-84 Plus graphing calculator had a command to turn any pixel on the screen on or off. By that point, I had only used the graph function as I had been taught: to plot mathematical functions on a X-Y axis. What if I could leverage this command to draw “freehand” on the screen? Could I recreate a kind of MS Paint?

The core of the program was a “cursor” that could be moved using the arrow keys, together with “ink on” and “ink off” buttons to start and stop drawing under the cursor. The program also did the necessary setup to remove axes and other unwanted visual clutter from the screen before drawing. Eventually, this was all wrapped with a multi-level menu-based UI, which allowed…

• displaying help text
• inserting text on the canvas in two sizes
• drawing shapes such as lines, circles and squares
• opening and storing drawings in slots
• “archiving” picture slots to free up storage

All of these were existing calculator functions that I made more accessible by linking them to the current cursor position, rather than requiring X,Y coordinates by text input for them to be inserted.

The program of 263 lines was built during, between and after classes, and after school.

In June 2011, I figured out how to connect my calculator to my computer, to transfer programs and files back and forth. I made a backup of the program, and collections of stored “pictures”. Somewhere in 2024, I got reminded of these files, and found a simple web-based TI emulator that could work with them. That’s how you’re seeing one of my authentic 2011 Pixpaint drawings today.