There's a post on Engadget about porting Doom to the TI-84 and TI-83, and it brought back some memories for me!

You see, when I was in highschool, I never had a computer - at least not until my senior year. But I did have a TI-85 calculator.

So I started messing around with their programming language. I'm not even sure what language I wrote in, but over the course of 3-4 months during classes, I wrote two programs for it. The first was a set of casino games - blackjack, a pseudo-roulette game, and craps. You could share your money between the different games, and I thought it was pretty slick.

The second was more involved. It was a text-based football simulation. It took the longest to write, and it actually had a form of AI - if you had a short yardage play, the defense would plan accordingly - defend against a short yardage play.

Of course, it wasn't very good. You could easily turn a huge passing play on 3rd and short because of the flawed AI. But it was fun anyway!

That was my first programming environment. What was yours?