I am very grateful to to the people behind ticalc.org and the whole community. I was in high school at the time, with a brand new TI-89 and a lot of free time, and it was wonderful. I am not going to name names but the whole community was fantastic and very welcoming for a teenage nerd. In retrospect, I wish I had enough experience to enjoy these couple of years more than I did. To me it felt normal, but now I realise that it was a minor golden age.

It is interesting that Justin regrets the NES. I do not remember reading that post at the time, but it would have sounded like grandpa yelling at clouds to me. The NES was something that happened when I was 4 or something; it was prehistoric.

In contrast, my successive TIs were much better than consoles to me (though I played Dreamcast and PC games as well). It was comparatively easy to dig quite deep into embedded programming and whilst I never really did any assembler on it, I used TIGCC quite a lot. And programs compiled with it; I still start Phoenix II on my TI 89-Ti every now and then.

The good thing is that we can now say that the TI community had some very good years ahead in 1999, possibly much better than the years before that this post laments. However, I am sad that the scene was mostly gone by 2005.

Anyway, it was a good ride.