ticalc-isaacs (u/ticalc-isaacs)

vanderZwan · 4 years ago

Yo! Thanks for creating/running the site! And also for not changing it. It doesn't need to change. I wish more websites would realize this.

The day that my program (Antrun) was on the frontpage of ticalc.org is still one of the biggest success-highs I've ever felt :)

ticalc-isaacs · 4 years ago

> Yo! Thanks for creating/running the site! And also for not changing it. It doesn't need to change. I wish more websites would realize this.

Totally agree. Ticalc.org went through a few redesigns in the early years - v1 (1996): https://ticalc.org/about/oldticalc/ticalc1/ and v2 (1997): https://ticalc.org/about/oldticalc/ticalc2/ - but the current (v3) design from 1999 has aged very well and we've never felt the need to change it much.

We have over the years considered and rejected becoming more of a community hub (i.e. with a forum instead of just comments on news articles) - moderation is just not a battle we're staffed for.

> The day that my program (Antrun) was on the frontpage of ticalc.org is still one of the biggest success-highs I've ever felt :)

bane · 4 years ago

The TI calculators have ended up serving American students in a similar way the BBC Micro served British students and now how the Raspberry Pi is serving everybody. "Cheap", ubiquitous, hackable, easy to understand computers.

Many of the developers I know can think back to the first computer they ever wrote a program for, but if you press them, they'll often realize that they actually first wrote software for the TI calcs.

https://ticalc.org/ is a treasure of the internet.

ticalc-isaacs · 4 years ago

> https://ticalc.org/ is a treasure of the internet.

Thanks! (I founded ticalc.org back in 1996.)

While calculators weren't my first programming experience, starting ticalc.org was formative for me. Getting all the TI hobby site maintainers (and ZShell developers) involved, registering the domain, setting up the server (Slackware!), etc. really led to my career in tech.

While I regularly encounter new technical challenges, almost every organizational challenge I've ever encountered as a technical leader since has had precedent from working on ticalc.org.

I do wonder whether and how ticalc.org should evolve now. Traffic and activity peaked before smartphones became ubiquitous (for obvious reasons) but it's still pretty popular - See https://ticalc.org/about/webstats.html.

We've always been strictly non-commercial and I don't envision changing that (mainly because I believe in our all-volunteer public service mission, but also because any serious encounter with bureaucracy would probably be fatal for the project.) But I am thinking about succession - what happens when our active staff no longer have the time or energy to maintain it.

I wonder if HN'ers with comparable experiences with long-running volunteer projects like this have some wisdom on this topic?