As of yesterday, June 21st, 2016, the illustrious and long-lived ticalc.org has turned 20 years old. For some of our users, this means that ticalc.org has been around for longer than they've been alive. For others of us, we remember the site in some of the earlier revisions and how the site struggled a bit over its first year. Since then, ticalc.org has brought together a great many people, whether people interested in learning how to program (who later went on to that career path because of ticalc) or who were simply interested in the ever increasing list of games and programs that users have written and uploaded to ticalc for people to find and use.

Ticalc celebrated this milestone by getting in touch with members who were once staff, and asking them what they thought about the site in the past, and how it shaped their futures today. You can read their replies here and get an understanding of how things went for ticalc so long ago. One of the original founders, Isaac Salpeter, has even offered to answer any questions that is asked of him in the comments section of ticalc's celebratory news post. Make sure to jump over and get any pressing questions posted up for them to answer before their attention wavers off to other things!

What has ticalc.org meant to you over the years? What role did it play in your development as a student, a programmer, a calculator programmer, or perhaps even as a gamer? Be sure to let us know in the attached thread. Cemetech certainly might not exist in its current form had its staff not been inspired to program calculators and get enthusiastic enough to create this site, so we salute ticalc.org on this memorable anniversary. Here's to the next 20 years!

Looking back on one of our favorite April Fools' Day pranks from recent years, this one in 2014.

Man, ticalc was THE mecca of calculator programs to me. If I couldn't find it on ticalc it didn't exist. I mean, it might have but I didn't look anywhere else because ticalc was my one-stop shop. As I wanted to learn how to create my own programs I gravitated towards Cemetech.

I think that was (and perhaps some extent still is) one of the beauties of ticalc.org: it's great at drawing people into the community and showing them the breadth and depth of programs available. I agree that it tends to funnel the people who actually want to learn to program into some of the other community sites that are centered more around community than archives, which I think is a good synergy that hopefully has been maintained over the years.

What is weird is that the 10th anniversary of ticalc.org never really sounded like it was so long ago to me. Time flows very fast as we grow older it seems. But more importantly I'm glad that ticalc.org managed to stick aroud for so long as the main TI community site. Congrats!

I'd probably feel really old of, ya know, I was 20 or something. But I'm not. So yeah. Good story.

But ticalc showed me not just the amazing things one could do with a calculator and some spare time, but what coding could do as a whole. That combined with Cemetech got me into coding and computers and stuff, and for that I'm grateful!

Wow.. Happy belated birthday ticalc.org!

I've got lots of fond memories. But one thing is for sure, the old ticalc.org mailing lists were a big part of pointing me in the right direction with learning Z80 Assembly back in the day!

By the way, did you know that Ticalc.org still has some sort of mailing lists, on Google Groups this time? They're just not very active compared to back in the days:

http://www.ticalc.org/community/lists/

I should try to update the TI-Story community-wide forum post stats page to include mailing lists at some point (which should be easy with the archived lists since the total message count by year is shown), but then that would mean I should do the TI-Nspire group as well.