Hacker News Reader

I had a similar high school experience. Not as much asm but spent way too many hours writing basic programs on that thing. prob should have spent more time listening in class.... nar! :-D

View on HN

Same. I wrote a horse racing program on the 82 that I sold to students so they could use it for betting. It was my first profitable software product :)

It was lame as crap. Just used the PRNG to multiply one of 5 variables by 10 and then draw them on the screen. Longest number won the race.

If you were clever enough you could reseed the RNG and pick a winner every time.

I wrote a solver of quadratic equations that occasionally adjusted the answer to be wrong by a few percent. The plan was to disseminate it to the class. I don't remember to what extent I managed or dared. I have now put my black hat days behind me.

That’s so incredibly evil that I love it :)

Imagine a high-school programming class where they teach you how to program on your calculator. Such a wasted opportunity - I'm pretty sure quite a few people in my class (including myself) would have loved that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com